Discourse Entities Research Articles

Effects of Priming and Audience Design on the Explicitness of Referring Expressions: Evidence From a Confederate Priming Paradigm

ABSTRACT In formulating a referring expression, speakers may choose between an explicit expression (such as a proper name or a noun phrase) or a reduced form such as a pronoun. We investigated whether speakers are influenced by their conversation partners to produce full noun phrases instead of pronouns and whether this differs depending on whether their partner was a native or a nonnative English speaker. Participants took turns describing and matching cartoons with a (confederate) partner, who used either full noun phrases or pronouns when referring to discourse entities. We found that participants were more explicit or less explicit in their own referring expressions depending on their partner’s behavior on the turn before and adapted to the same extent with native and nonnative partners. We conclude that speakers adapt their production of referring expressions based on what their partners say but do not make strategic adjustments based on who their partner is.

Misspoken words affect the perception and retrieval of intended words

ABSTRACT Everyday speech contains disfluencies, including unintentionally spoken words. What is the fate of the misspoken word in the comprehender’s memory? In this study, we asked whether: (1) the gender of misspoken words lingers and affects how the intended word is perceived, and (2) whether and how lingering representations can cause interference during the retrieval of the intended word. In two experiments, participants provided spoken responses to given prompts. In Experiment 1, participants used masculine or feminine pronouns to refer to gender-neutral words (passenger) depending on the gender of a preceding misspoken word (pilot or stewardess), suggesting that the gender of reparanda lingers. Experiment 2 showed that the presence of a misspoken word resulted in a reduction of pronominal reference to the intended word, suggesting that the misspoken word causes interference when the intended word is being retrieved by functioning as an additional discourse entity.

Spatial, Temporal and Epistemic Proximization as Dynamic Event Construal Strategies

The present paper examines the discursive construal of the Coronavirus as the proximizing entity in the Anglo-American political discourse with the goal of elucidating the pragmatic effects and underlying construal operations of threat representation. The research was carried out within the theoretical framework of cognitive pragmatics, and the data consists of the written samples and transcripts of the political statements made by the ruling party representatives at the Coronavirus public briefings. The corpora were concluded to be replete with linguistic forms that realize intersubjective positioning strategy for the sake of achieving shared cognitive viewpoint, thus legitimizing policies implemented during the pandemic.

Singular Reference in Fictional Discourse?

Abstract Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work there as they do in simple-sentence assertions, but rather as fictional names do.

Anadeixis and the signalling of discourse structure

By “anadeixis” (a termed first coined by Ehlich, 1982) is meant, prototypically, the indexical functioning of certain context-bound expressions to target discourse entities which are either not yet topical, or whose erstwhile topical status has faded. It is the discourse-structuring function of anadeictic indexicals that will be the particular focus of this study. The basis for the discussion will be two short whole texts, in two languages (French and English). This will make it possible to show how certain ‘strict’-anadeictic and discourse-deictic references may signal the macro- (content structures) and super-structures (discourse-functional structures) that characterize them. Such references may serve either to foreshadow a transition between major discourse units within a given text, or to actually introduce one.

Role-based Association of Verbs, Actions, and Sentiments with Entities in Political Discourse

ABSTRACTA crucial challenge in measuring how text represents an entity is the need to associate each representative expression with a relevant entity to generate meaningful results. Common solutions to this problem are usually based on proximity methods that require a large corpus to reach reasonable levels of accuracy. We show how such methods for the association between an entity and a representation yield a high percentage of false positives at the expression level and low validity at the document level. We introduce a solution that combines syntactic parsing, semantic role labeling logic, and a machine learning approach—the role-based association method. To test our method, we compared it with prevalent methods of association on the news coverage of two entities of interest—the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. We found that the role-based association method is more accurate at the expression and the document levels.

Strong and weak pronouns in the covert system of pronouns

AbstractIn this article, which is taken almost verbatim from parts ofAgreement Beyond Phi(Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2017.Agreement beyond phi. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.), I focus on a puzzling observation about subjectproacross languages: in languages such as Japanese and those of Romance, the subjectprobehaves exactly like a pronoun in being able to freely refer to entities in the discourse with reasonable context, and also to refer sentence internally to a subject, an object, or other phrases. However, in Chinese, the subjectprois extremely limited in its reference potential: it is able to refer to a discourse entity in very narrow contexts, and sentence internally, its antecedent is limited to the subject. I show that the Chinese subjectprodemonstrates the principles of Strong Uniformity, by depending on ϕ-feature agreement for sentence-internal reference, and when that option isn’t taken, switches to the Topic feature to refer to a discourse entity.

Odkrivanje koreferenčnosti v slovenskem jeziku na označenih besedilih iz coref149

Odkrivanje koreferenčnosti je ena izmed treh ključnih nalog ekstrakcije informacij iz besedil, kamor spadata še prepoznavanje imenskih entitet in ekstrakcija povezav. Namen odkrivanja koreferenčnosti je prek celotnega besedila ustrezno združiti vse omenitve entitet v skupine, v katerih vsaka skupina predstavlja svojo entiteto. Metode za reševanje te naloge se za nekatere jezike z več govorci razvijajo že dalj časa, medtem ko za slovenski jezik še niso bile izdelane. V prispevku predstavljamo nov, ročno označen korpus za odkrivanje koreferenčnosti v slovenskem jeziku – korpus coref149. Za avtomatsko odkrivanje koreferenčnosti smo prilagodili sistem SkipCor, ki smo ga izdelali za angleški jezik. Sistem SkipCor je na slovenskem gradivu dosegel 76 % ocene CoNLL 2012. Ob tem smo analizirali še vplive posameznih tipov značilk in preverili, katere so pogoste napake. Pri analiziranju besedil smo razvili tudi programsko knjižnico s spletnim vmesnikom, prek katere je možno izvesti vse opisane analize in neposredno primerjati njihovo uspešnost. Rezultati analiz so obetavni in primerljivi z rezultati pri drugih, bolj razširjenih jezikih. S tem smo dokazali, da je avtomatsko odkrivanje koreferenčnosti v slovenskem jeziku lahko uspešno, v prihodnosti pa bi bilo potrebno izdelati še večji in kvalitetnejši korpus, v katerem bodo koreferenčno naslovljene vse posebnosti slovenskega jezika, kar bi omogočilo izgradnjo učinkovitih metod za avtomatsko reševanje koreferenčnih problemov.

Heroes and Cowards: Genealogy, Subjectivity and War in the Twenty-First Century

From the wars of Ancient Greece to the collapsing Islamic State in the present, the same, apparently timeless protagonists appear and their stories told and re-told: the heroes, cowards and other combatants. This article proposes a framework which combines a Foucauldian genealogical approach with his conception of the subject as both constituted in relation to code-oriented moralities, and creatively self-formed in relation to ethics-oriented moralities (Foucault 1992, pp. 5, 25), to understand how it is possible to speak meaningfully of heroes and cowards in the age of the drone and the jihadist. Section one will explore the applicability of Foucauldian genealogy as the methodological basis for understanding present combatants in the context of war. The second section will assess Foucault’s ‘modes of subjectivation’ and ‘practices of the self’ (Foucault 1992, p. 28), as a means of analyzing the emergence of the subject of war over millennia, with emphasis on the ethical dimension of subjectivity that can be applied to heroes and cowards. Then the third section will use insights from Homer and Augustine to begin to illustrate how Foucault’s genealogical approach and his conception of ethical subjectivity combine to enable heroes and cowards to be meaningfully spoken of and better understood in the domain of war today. The purpose of such a study is to set out the basis on which political genealogy after Foucault can provide a nuanced conceptualization of subjectivity in modern war, as those subjects are formed, claimed, valorized and criticized by competing entities in contemporary political discourse.

"Une espèce d’ouvrage cosmopolite". Variations énonciatives dans les articles encyclopédiques des Lumières, de Chambers à l’Encyclopédie

By inventing the encyclopedic dictionary, the Age of Enlightenment gave rise to a new discourse entity: the encyclopedic article. How is scholarly discourse expressed across lexical fragmentation? Between Chambers, who is the sole author of his Cyclopedia (2 volumes, 1728) and the Encyclopédie (17 volumes of articles, 1751-1765; 11 volumes of illustrations, 1762-1772), achieved by "une société de gens de lettres" whose contributions were coordinated by Diderot et D'Alembert, the writing and editorial processes behind these first encyclopedic endeavors undergo deep changes. Through representative sample studies, the present article attempts to measure the impact of such changes on the way in which encyclopedic discourse manifests itself within the articles through markers signaling its enunciation.

Pronominal Anaphor Resolution and the Underlying Cognitive Mechanism

When people tend to refer to a previous mentioned discourse entity, they can use various types of anaphoric expressions, such as pronouns, definite noun phrases, proper names or expressions that are introduced by a lexical modifier or a comparative adjective. Among the different types of anaphoric expressions, pronoun is most common and frequently used which contains only a little information about the referent, while definite expressions contain much richer semantic information. As pronouns contain very little information on their own, they are always ambiguous. The cognitive mechanism that underlies the comprehension of pronouns, especially the ones with ambiguities, catches the interests of many researchers. Various tasks have been used to investigate this issue and the results did not go for the same direction. A combination of multiple research methods is needed for a better and deeper understanding of anaphora.

Changes in attitude: Evaluative language in secondary school and university history textbooks

There is much disagreement among education specialists about how history textbooks should represent the past and engage with alternative perspectives toward it at different stages of schooling. This article reports findings from a quantitative study comparing the ways explicit evaluative language is used in secondary school and university history textbooks. The study examines various types of evaluative acts including judgments of people, construals of their emotions, and evaluations of inanimate historical entities. It also groups evaluative acts in terms of the discourse entities that are performing them (i.e., historical actors, the authorial voice, or other historians/interpreters of the past). Key findings include a higher overall occurrence of explicit evaluation in the secondary school texts, extensive reliance on emotional language in both groups of texts, and little difference between the two groups in their engagement with other members of the history discipline.

Przeciw wykluczeniu. Konceptualizacje współczesnej polskiej kobiety z perspektywy dyskursu feministycznego

The article presents polish woman conceptualisation fordem in a current feminist discours. In the perspective of it women identity charactericed as being discriminated and excluded from the public. One of the discoursive strategy of changing social order is constructing an publishing the image of woman whose ablithies and predispositions make her capable of taking social and job position equally with the men’s. On the other side tere is a image of average, dominated and restrieced by the offensive patriarchal coulture. Entities of feminist discourse, while fighting for an symbolic authority, use opposithional categories: man — woman, conservatism — liberalism, patriarch — equality, tradition — modernity, passivity — dynamizm and public — private.

Discourse analysis based segregation of relevant document segments for knowledge acquisition

AbstractDocuments are a useful source of expert knowledge in organizations and can be used to foresee, in an earlier stage of a product's life cycle, potential issues and solutions that might occur in later stages of its life cycle. In this research, these stages are, respectively, design and assembly. Even if these documents are available online, it is rather difficult for users to access the knowledge contained in these documents. It is therefore desirable to automatically extract the knowledge contained in these documents and store them in a computer accessible or manipulable form. This paper describes an approach for the first step in this acquisition process: automatically identifying segments of documents that are relevant to aircraft assembly, so that they can be further processed for acquiring expert knowledge. Such identification of relevant segments is necessary for avoiding processing of unrelated information that is costly and possibly distracting for domain relevance. The approach to extracting relevant segments has two steps. The first step is the identification of sentences that form a coherent segment of text, within which the topic does not shift. The second step is to classify segments that are within the topics of interest for knowledge acquisition, that is, aircraft assembly in this instance. These steps filter out segments that are unrelated, and therefore need not be processed for subsequent knowledge acquisition. The steps are implemented by understanding the contents of documents. Using methods of discourse analysis, in particular, discourse representation theory, a list of discourse entities is obtained. The difference in discourse entities between sentences is used to distinguish between segments. The list of discourse entities in a segment is compared against a domain ontology for classification. The implementation and results of validation on sample texts for these steps are described.

The Role of Discourse Prominence in Antecedent Search: The Case of Genitive Noun Phrases

The research investigated how readers comprehended reflexive pronoun anaphors (e.g., himself or herself) that occurred in the same sentence with an antecedent that was modified by a genitive noun phrase (NP). Prior research suggested that during the search for an antecedent, readers consider only those preceding discourse entities that are prominent in the discourse; thus, genitive NPs would not be considered because they lack discourse prominence (Badecker & Straub, 2002). Two reading experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, genitive NPs were noun descriptions that were strongly stereotyped for gender (e.g., “The executive’s/secretary’s father cut himself…”). In Experiment 2, genitive NPs were gender-specific proper names (e.g., “John’s/Mary’s father cut himself…”), similar to those used in the prior research. The results indicated that genitive NPs that were strongly stereotyped for gender influenced sentence processing time, but genitive NPs that were gender-specific proper names did not; thus, genitive NPs are not uniformly excluded from consideration during the resolution of reflexive pronouns.

Additive Linking in Second Language Discourse: Lexical, Syntactic and Discourse Organizational Choices in Intermediate and Advanced Learners of L2 German with L1 French

This paper reports results from a study on the acquisition of additive scope particles as a means to enhance discourse coherence by French learners of German as a second language. It addresses the questions of which additive devices intermediate and advanced learners produce; which possibilities of syntactic integration in relation to the added constituent they use; and whether they choose target-like information units in order to establish additive relations across utterances. Oral production data from an elicited discourse production study reveal that the form of the additive expressions among advanced learners nearly always corresponds to the pattern preferred in the target language without, however, tapping its full potential. Rather, learners overuse options that are formally but not functionally similar in both languages. This uniform behavior at the utterance level does not go hand in hand with target-like preferences for discourse organization. Native speakers of German tend to construe stretches of discourse as an answer to an implicit YES/NO question. They focus on the occurrence of events and use the assertion component to establish links and comparisons across utterances. Native speakers of French, on the other hand, prefer to construe utterances as answering implicit Wh-questions, thereby focusing discourse entities and establishing contrasts between them. Based on their first language’s entity-based utterance organization, even advanced second language learners of German are shown to use a hybrid system, establishing mainly entity-based and only a few assertion-based discourse relations.

Semantic Properties of Pronouns Modulate Pronoun Use: Evidence from Cantonese

Pronouns vary across languages in terms of their specification of semantic features. For example, the third singular pronoun in Cantonese (keoi), unlike in English, does not make distinctions of gender and animacy. The present study aims to provide insight into how semantic properties of pronouns modulate speakers' choice of referring expression by investigating pronoun use in a language with different feature specifications from English, namely Cantonese. Using a story completion task, we found that unlike in English, the gender of discourse entities did not influence pronoun use in Cantonese (Experiment 1). In contrast to gender, we found that animacy had a significant influence on Cantonese speakers' pronoun use (Experiment 2). We suggest that semantic features such as animacy that are inherently linked to the accessibility of a referent may influence pronoun use irrespective of semantic properties of pronouns, whereas features such as gender that are not inherently linked to referent accessibility may only influence reference production via interaction with pronouns.

Definite article bridging relations in L2: A learner corpus study

Abstract Bridging relations are used when the identity of a discourse-new entity can be inferred via lexical relations from an antecedent (e. g. a cake … the slice) or non-lexically via reference to world knowledge or discourse structure (e. g. a war … the survivors). Such relations are marked in English via the definite article, which is considered a difficult feature of the English language for L2 learners to acquire, particularly for L1 speakers of article-less languages. This paper provides an Integrated Contrastive Model (e. g. Granger 1996) of the L1 and L2 production of definite article bridging relations using L2 English learner corpus data produced by native Mandarin and Korean speakers at four L2 proficiency levels, alongside comparative native English data. The data is taken from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE, Ishikawa 2011, 2013), totalling just under 400,000 words with over 1500 bridging NPs identified. Results suggest subtle but significant differences between L1-L2 and L2-L2 groupings in terms of the frequency of particular bridging relation types and lemmatised wordings identified in the data, although there was little evidence of pseudo-longitudinal development. Such differences may suggest an effect of L1-L2 linguistic relativity, influencing the selection of relational links between given/new discourse entities during L2 production.

Discourse management

Speakers achieve coherence in discourse by alternating between differential lexical forms e.g. noun phrase, pronoun, and null form in accordance with the accessibility of the entities they refer to, i.e. whether they introduce an entity into discourse for the first time or continue referring to an entity they already mentioned before. Moreover, tracking of entities in discourse is a multimodal phenomenon. Studies show that speakers are sensitive to the informational structure of discourse and use fuller forms (e.g. full noun phrases) in speech and gesture more when re-introducing an entity while they use attenuated forms (e.g. pronouns) in speech and gesture less when maintaining a referent. However, those studies focus mainly on non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English, German and French). The present study investigates whether the same pattern holds for pro-drop languages. It draws data from adult native speakers of Turkish using elicited narratives. We find that Turkish speakers mostly use fuller forms to code subject referents in re-introduction context and the null form in maintenance context and they point to gesture space for referents more in re-introduction context compared maintained context. Hence we provide supportive evidence for the reverse correlation between the accessibility of a discourse referent and its coding in speech and gesture. We also find that, as a novel contribution, third person pronoun is used in re-introduction context only when the referent was previously mentioned as the object argument of the immediately preceding clause.

Third person pronoun forms in Estonian in the light of centering theory

This paper explains the distinctions between the Estonian 3rd person overt pronoun and the zero person marker in spoken narratives. As both forms express the most salient entities in discourse, the saliency criterion cannot distinguish them. The Centering Theory is used to explore if the overt pronoun and zero have different effects on discourse coherence, i.e. whether there is a difference between transition types relating to zero and those signaling the overt pronoun. Additionally, factors such as grammatical role, case and clause type affecting the choice of pronominal forms are studied to supplement results from the Centering analysis. It is hypothesized that the use of the zero form connects to the CONTINUE transition, while the overt pronoun combines with other Centering- based transition types as well. Furthermore, results show that the zero form is more restricted in its usage contexts and signals mainly nominative subjects in main clauses, while the overt form can appear more widely in different linguistic environments.