Discourse Organization Research Articles

Detecting clinically significant events through automated language analysis: Quo imus?

We found the recent paper by Bedi et al.1 simultaneously exciting, heartening and, sadly, a bit discouraging. It shows that modern, statistical natural language processing (NLP) and machine-learning (ML) techniques can potentially be useful as a component of diagnosis, here predicting who among those at risk will eventually transition to full-blown psychosis. This result follows closely our own and others observations of the value of these techniques in, for example, discriminating patients with schizophrenia from controls,2 discriminating schizophrenia probands, first-degree relatives and unrelated healthy controls,3 differentiating those at high risk of psychosis from unrelated putatively healthy participants4 and in a candidate gene study linking language in general to underlying neurobiology,5 all quite encouraging outcomes. Our disappointment is not directly with the Bedi et al.1 paper itself, but that we as a field are, after this long proving period, still at the ‘promising’ stage. This inertia arises from two primary factors. The first is owing to the use of small, often second-hand data sets produced for other studies, which severely constrains the NLP techniques that can be applied and the generality of the obtained results. The second is that the methodologies applied must become sufficiently assimilated into the field to be used effectively in analyses so as to provide valid, reliable measures of the constructs of interest. This understanding permits better linking of the appropriate features of language to the underlying etiologies of interest. To realize the potential of the transformative next steps, we must routinely and systematically strive to obtain larger data sets containing multiple language samples from participants collected over time. This will allow quantifying the joint time course of the disease(s) and changes in language. Increased sample size further improves the methodologies, permitting moving beyond the less-reliable cross-validation to the use of the gold-standard for validating ML results, which is a ‘hold-out’ data set. In such an approach all modeling is conducted blind to the hold-out set, and when modeling is completed, the model is run on the held-out set to measure expected performance in the larger population, thereby ensuring generalization while lowering the risk of overfitting. At least as importantly, realistically sized data sets allow the application of larger combinations of more sophisticated NLP/ML techniques that move beyond the often used simple word-count features. This permits deeper characterization of more important aspects of language, such as semantic structures, discourse organization, as well as acoustic characteristics.6 From our perspective, Figure 3 from Bedi et al.1 is a beautiful, low-dimensional, small, incremental step toward our vision, which is that of a truly high-dimensional language-feature space with the potential to align with the aspirational goals of the NIMH Research Domain Criteria by employing language to locate and pinpoint those with severe mental illness at coordinates within this space. Once localized, the features that define the resulting hypothesized clusters can potentially be calibrated for use in early detection, continuously evaluating treatment and providing links to the biology underlying these diseases, simultaneously superseding our existing diagnostic categories. But this vision is only achievable with purpose-designed studies containing sufficiently large populations with a mix of both healthy participants and individuals sampled across multiple categories of diagnostic groups. Our field must become versed in the use of more powerful applications of NLP/ML techniques and offer more reproducible methodologies. These results, taken with others, are sufficiently encouraging so that it is now time for us to move beyond ‘promising’.

Дискурс-анализ и стилистика: интегративные методы исследования медиа коммуникации

In Russian communicative studies we can observe the collision of traditional Russian Stylistics and Western Discourse Analysis which resulted in eclectic and random use of terminology and methods of Discourse Analysis. Even the terms style and discourse are often mixed up and are not differentiated. The purpose of the article is to point out some theoretical problems concerning the “competition” of two communicative disciplines in the study of media discourse - Stylistics and Discourse Analysis - and to outline the ways of their possible cooperation and integration of their methods in Russian Linguistics. In our research we analyze two theoretical conceptions of text analysis in media communication - stylistic and discursive, which have the common subject of research, which is text, and the same communicative vector of study, but they apply different methods of analysis and different terminology. I distinguish between style and discourse and argue that style and discourse do not exclude one another, but to some extent they overlap and complement each other. Such approach gives a new impetus to the development of Russian and Slavonic stylistics in communicative perspective as well as encourages the study of stylistic organization of media discourse.

QUESTION OF SPECIFIC STRUCTURAL SPACE OF AUTHOR`S IDIOSTYLE (ON THE BASIS OF VLADIMIR ORLOV’S PROSE)

The article presents the original author's view on the problem of structuration of individual style space of artistic and literary text. At the present stage of development of linguistics particularly relevant not only is the study of anthropocentric, but first of all anthropogenetic things of personal language picture of the world that, in fact, related to the activities of the language personality of the author. In domestic linguistic stylistics laid the fundamental traditions of the study as the most important copyright individual style incarnation of aesthetic manifestation of the mysterious Slavic soul, which is embodied in the brilliant artistic and literary texts, as in the foreground immanent beginning of the organization of the text space/ The search for the structural criteria of realization of the author's personality in the text (and, consequently, language identity, which significantly affect the positive restraining tendencies to destruction of the Russian literary language) lead to treatment to the author specially constructed traditional forms of organization of speech tissue literary discourse - in particular, such as paragraph building, correlated with education as dictem. Their analysis is rightly made in the text of the outstanding contemporary Russian writer Vladimir Orlov based on the principles and the nomination-syntactic techniques that allow to approach the structuration of the text and, accordingly, organization of individual style in the aspect of division into text segments with different syntactic extension, represent isolate fragments of subjective picture of the world.

Discourse organization in parent-led narratives

This article analyzes parent narratives in Basque and Spanish by means of a story aimed at boys and girls between ages of 3 and 8 in order to investigate the similarities and differences in the narrative input provided by parents, paying attention to structural and organizational features in terms of their narrative forms and functions. We used a quantitative methodology that recorded the frequencies of the different variables under study: narrative length, structure, cohesion (connectors and verb tense), and the types of interaction between adults and children in both languages. The results show differences in narrative input relative to the age of the child and the language used. With older children, parents used a less interactive style in both Basque and Spanish. Furthermore, there are differences in narrative structure as a function of the age of the child: with the 3–4 year olds, more clauses were used to explain the details of the action taking place outdoors. Finally, narratives in Basque made greater use of temporal connectors, while narratives in Spanish used more subordinating connectors.

Frames for clause combining

The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions that are beyond clauses and sentences and function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse. Specifically, it deals with two particular instances of what is termed adiscourse pattern, the conventionalized combination of genre and text-type: a personal experience narrative and an expository discussion of a personal opinion on an abstract topic. The paper discusses findings from various studies that characterize usage of lexical and clause-level constructions in the course of producing texts based on the two discourse patterns, and contrasts these findings with quantitative and qualitative analyses of clause combining in the same texts. The study relies on a corpus of 40 texts collected from Hebrew speaker-writers, who each produced a narrative and an expository text following a semi-structured elicitation controlling for the components offield,tenor, andmode. The distributional and functional findings of the study suggest that discourse patterns, like other constructions, occupy a cline of idiomacity/schematicity. In its conclusion, the study considers the tangential and intersecting points between Construction Grammar, on the one hand, and discourse analysis, on the other.

Razgrađivanje emotivnog diskursa u romanu Gullo Gullo Miodraga Bulatovića

The paper deals with a detailed analysis of the characteristics of emotional discourse, organized in a literary text, specifically in the novel Gullo Gullo by Miodrag Bulatovic. Since expressing of emotions can be verbal and non-verbal, both codes relating the organization of emotional discourse have been activated. In the analysis of literary coded emotional discourse the author had to consider two-instance system of art. The fiction as a basic distinctive feature of a literary text has a crucial influence on the emotional semiosis resulting in producing emotional meaning. That process has always been influenced by various features of poetic language and its combinatorics, which are significantly different from encoding in real chronotope expressed in native language forms, governed by quite different rules of expressing emotions and transferred by the people and not the literary structure. Since the fact that disorders of phatic function of a language, communication and culture, are defined as major agents of the process in question their accepted values novels written by Miodrag Bulatovic, the author points out the importance of carnival, grotesque, pornography and satire which have been used as the main degradation processes of the canonized cultural and communication patterns in the novel, whose destructive operation inevitably affects the emotional discourse.

Types of Discourse Markers: Their Ethnocultural Diversity in Scientific Text

The paper aims to reveal the role of ethnolinguistic and discursive factors that determine the direction of discursive units’ functioning in an academic text. The issue is dealt with on the basis of academic texts in the German and Russian languages belonging to geological type of academic discourse. The following functional types of discursive markers (DMs) are distinguished: 1) the markers ensuring text coherence, 2) the markers disclosing a speaker's attitude to an utterance, and 3) the markers reflecting the process of interaction between the author and the reader. This article is devoted to consideration of the second group DMs. Comparative analysis of using DMsdiscloses specific ways of presenting academic knowledge and the influence of ethnolinguistic models of academic discourse organization on this variety.

NARNIA: a new twist to an old tale. A pilot RCT to evaluate a multilevel approach to improving discourse in aphasia

Background: Developing effective interventions for people with aphasia, which both ameliorate impaired language and directly impact on real-life communication, is a key focus of aphasia research. While single-word and sentence-level models of language processing have informed effective interventions, there is limited evidence of intervention approaches that extend the principles from these models to discourse.Aims: This pilot randomised controlled trial (RCT) aimed to compare a novel multilevel intervention, a Novel Approach to Real-life communication: Narrative Intervention in Aphasia (NARNIA), with usual care (UC), with a view to assess the feasibility and acceptability of the approach and estimate effect sizes to design and power a definitive trial.Methods & Procedures: In a prospective, single-blind, RCT, 14 people with mild to moderate aphasia, between 2 and 165 months following stroke, were randomised to the two interventions. Both therapy conditions were delivered four times weekly over 5 weeks. The NARNIA intervention specifically combined word retrieval, sentence production, and discourse macrostructure across a range of everyday discourse (ED) genres. UC comprised any speech-language therapy routinely used in clinical practice, individually tailored to meet the assessed needs of the participant. The Curtin University Discourse Protocol (CUDP) was used to measure verb access, sentence production, and discourse structure.Outcomes & Results: Eight participants were assigned to the NARNIA intervention and six participants to UC. No significant differences were present in baseline prognostic factors between the two groups prior to intervention. Following intervention, orientation aspects of macrostructure were significantly greater in the NARNIA group on ED measures than in the UC group, with no other between-group differences found. Significant changes were, however, seen within groups across ED genres. The NARNIA group made significant gains across all language levels, while the UC made isolated gains in sentence production. Few changes were seen in narrative discourse for either group. While single-word processing was not significantly different between groups, significant within-group differences were seen. While both groups significantly improved in retrieving nouns in isolation, only the NARNIA group made significant improvement in verb processing. No change was seen in constrained sentence production for either group.Conclusions: These findings are highly promising in demonstrating the use of macrostructure to scaffold production of words and sentences and improve discourse organisation. The significantly greater within-group gains for the NARNIA participants will provide a platform to power a larger trial to evaluate the effectiveness of this integrated multilevel intervention for aphasia.

“Go up to miss thingy”. “He’s probably like a whatsit or something”.

In this paper we focus on some of the so-called ‘placeholders’, words that are almost empty semantically, used with multiple functions in communication and whose meaning has to be inferred by the listener (Jucker et al. 2003: 1749). This category of placeholders includes terms such as thing, thingy, stuff, thingummybob, thingybob and whatsit. We firstly identify the most common words in this category in the language of British adults and teenagers and we then consider them from a syntactic, a semantic and a pragmatic perspective. Our findings suggest that (i) the importance of these words lies in their pragmatic rather than in their semantic functions; (ii) contrary to what we expected, placeholders are not more common, statistically speaking, in the language of the younger generations than in that of adults; (iii) adults and teenagers share some of the uses of these terms; (iv) in the language of teenagers these dummy words are used in a wider range of contexts and situations. We finally contend that these lexical items show properties typical of pragmatic markers, since they help in the organisation of discourse, they are sometimes used as devices to hold or cede the floor and they also function interpersonally by promoting cooperation between the participants in the conversation.

O conto e o reconto na promoção da oralidade: uma experiência na Educação Pré-Escolar (Portugal)

This study of qualitative nature, presents an educational experience held in the academic year of 2010/2011, in a classroom of a public kindergarten of Portugal. Selecting 4 kids (two with 4 years and two with 5 years) of a group of 17 children, the kindergarten teacher chose four stories of the Portuguese ational Plan for Reading and reviewed the children re-telling analyzing the level of sequencing and the inclusion of knowledge and personal experiences (MARQUES, 1990). The results revealed the potentialities of the tale/re-telling in the promotion of orality, namely, i) taking the kids to find strategies to start and to finish the stories and using expressions of introduction and conclusion of the stories and ii) encouraging children to apply knowledge of stories, of the projects developed in the kindergarten context and from their personal experiences. These data, situated in this specific educational context, reveal patterns of oral discourse organization of these children and lead us to reflect on the role of telling/re-telling in the promotion of orality in context of pre-school Education.

How children "add" or "restrict" entities and temporal spans in narrations: evidence from Italian and English native children

This work focuses on the acquisition of restrictive and (temporal and non temporal) additive means by Italian and English native children, especially including scope particles, together with children's progressing ability to build textual cohesion in a narrative text. In particular, the author tries to identify the age at which additive and restrictive means appear and the functions they carry out in discourse organization of very young subjects, as well as the cognitive operations the latter can use. Thanks to the consideration of two different languages, this work also explores the possible language-specific strategies exploited by the two groups of children. Part of the results can be read as age cognitive restrictions independent of the L1 of the child. Additive means appear from the age of four on but with some differences according to the types of quantification solicited, namely the quantification of entities and that of time spans: the 4-year-olds clearly have less problems in quantifying entities rather than time spans. In comparison with adult reference groups, Italian and English L1 children of any group exploit additive temporal means less frequently than means quantifying entities; the quantification of entities involving a negation shows up from the age of seven. From a cognitive viewpoint, the precocious emergence of entity contrasts by additive means is in agreement with what Givón (1995) maintains with respect to nominal referents (they are perceptually and cognitively more salient, they are acquired early in ontogeny and evolve early in phylogeny, they are culturally central entities etc.). Concerning negative particles, their later appearance is in agreement with some studies about negation showing the more problematic processing of negative structures by children with respect to the positive ones (cf. Giuliano 2004). Some other strategies identified in children's retellings are, conversely, to be interpreted as language-specific. The more frequent problems that Italian children have with the concept of iteration with respect to English L1 children could be due to the polyfunctional semantics of the Italian particles ancora ('more, again, still') and sempre ('always, again, still'); the late appearance of also in English L2 children's data, an internal positioning particle, is probably caused by the fact that English has an external, perceptually more salient particle, namely too, whose semantics is equal to that of also.

ТЕКСТОВО-ДИСКУРСИВНЫЕ КАТЕГОРИИ КРОССВОРДА КАК ЖАНРА ЭНИГМАТИКИ

The aim of this article is to characterize the system of textual and discursive categories of crossword as an enigmatic genre. The object of the study is magazines with Russian crossword puzzles, the subject matter is their textual and discursive categorical system. The basic method is contextual-interpretational analysis. The practical value of the research is to use its results in the critical discourse analysis and text theory, as well as in crossword-making. The finding of the research is that a crossword in real communication is a discourse, the mediator of which serves as a text, boasting the nature of hypertext, with a certain degree of coding, oriented on unraveling it and intended, as a rule, for intellectual training and entertainment. Crossword is characterized by its specific genre canons which are reflected in the realization of textual and discursive categories as the invariant signs representing the most essential conformities with the law of text organization and functioning in discourse. The integrity of crosswords realizes itself in the process of its complete unraveling by the addressee in accordance with the sender’s project. The discretity as the crossword’s category shows up in the separateness of the phases of the text generation and reception. The informative value of crossword is mediated by the existence of the text on the border of two minds, using the information for the text’s generation and unraveling. The anthropocentricity is represented by the sender’s program of addressability submitted to a certain number of hypothetical addressees. The genre of crossword presupposes interaction, conditioned by the intentions of intellectual training, entertainment, game, cognition of new information and orientation on the process of unraveling. Crossword is submerged in the intertext and brings about intersemiotic relations in culture. The diffuse continuum of this genre is provided by the free development of discourse and its orientation on the graphical coherence of the text.

Modeling the relationship between lexico-grammatical and discourse organization skills in middle grade writers: insights into later productive language skills that support academic writing

Learning to write in middle school requires the expansion of sentence-level and discourse-level language skills. In this study, we investigated later language development in the writing of a cross-sectional sample of 235 upper elementary and middle school students (grades 4–8) by examining the use of (1) lexico-grammatical forms that support precise and concise academic writing and (2) paragraph-level structures for organizing written discourse, known as micro-genres. Writing studies typically elicit and analyze long compositions, instead the present study employed two brief writing tasks that allowed for the evaluation of language skills while minimizing the influence of topic knowledge and other non-linguistic factors. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that the two facets of language proficiency studied—lexico-grammatical skills and skill in producing paragraph-level structures (micro-genres)—represented distinguishable dimensions of productive language skill in this sample. On both dimensions, older writers (grades 6–8) demonstrated greater skill than 4th and 5th graders. These findings, which provide an initial proof of concept for the use of short writing tasks to study language skills that support academic writing, are discussed in relation to writing theory and pedagogy.

Is black always the opposite of white? An investigation on the comprehension of antonyms in people with schizophrenia and in healthy participants.

The present investigation sought to expand our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the recognition of antonyms and to evaluate whether these processes differed in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Antonymy is the most robust of the lexico-semantic relations and is relevant to both the mental organization of the lexicon and the organization of coherent discourse, as attested by the resurgence of interest in antonymy in the linguistic and psychological domains. In contrast, the vast literature on semantic processing in schizophrenia almost ignored antonymy. In this study, we tested the online comprehension of antonyms in 39 Italian patients with paranoid schizophrenia and in an equal number of pairwise-matched healthy controls. Participants read a definitional sentence fragment (e.g., the opposite of black is), followed by the correct antonym (white) or by a semantically unrelated word (nice), and judged whether or not the target word was correct. Patients were rather accurate in identifying antonyms, but compared to controls, they showed longer response times and higher priming scores, suggesting an exaggerated contextual facilitation. Presumably, this reflects a deficient controlled semantic processing and an overreliance on stored semantic representations.

Sense-making in financial communication: Semiotic vectors and iconographic strategies in banking advertising

The paper analyzes the cognitive, affective and persuasive role of visual metaphors in financial advertising discourse. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the restoration of trust-based relationships has become a prime marketing objective. In particular, the crisis-fraught retail banks have adapted their communication strategies to signal profound institutional transformations in response to trust depletion and public image impairment.The methodological approach is based on the semio-narrative analysis of encoding tools that correlate with specific communicational objectives. Special emphasis is placed on the transformative articulation from risk-prone to risk-averse institutional discourse by correlating risk factors with rhetorical strategies. Cultural inferences represent significant argumentative resources and are explored as strategic devices in discourse organization. The paper further examines the critical role of image/text inter-textuality as an enhancer of persuasive relevance.Empirically grounded in pre-crisis and post-crisis advertising campaigns at Société Générale, the in-depth visual discourse analysis shows how the strategic use of discursive resources, both visual and verbal, impacts identity construct and collective sense-making. The resulting paradigm of visual signs establishes a semiotic frame for subsequent survey studies to measure communicational effectiveness.

The influence of peer reviewers as literacy brokers on the construction of texts for publication in ISI-indexed journals: A study of medical research articles

This study focused on the “text histories,” peer reviewers' comments, and authors' responses of 20 medical research articles published in ISI indexed journals. To identify the types of comments peer reviewers frequently make on submitted articles to shape suitable texts for publication in medical ISI indexed journals, 368 comments are categorized into four groups. The results revealed that peer reviewers' comments can be categorized into four different classes: Comments made with regard to scientific issues, language issues, discourse and text organization, and journal format. The comments mainly focused on scientific and language use problems. In detail, classification of comments can help novice and periphery researchers successfully uncover the reviewers' comments, publish their articles in reputable journals, and disseminate their knowledge among others.

Особенности коммуникативной организации дискурса в романе М.А. Булгакова «Мастер и Маргарита»

Особенности коммуникативной организации дискурса в романе М.А. Булгакова «Мастер и Маргарита»

Information structural effects of German P- and D-pronouns in discourse

The present investigation steps back to the claims of the 1990s by assuming that there is a functional opposition in the use of P- and D-PRO which affects the status of the pronoun's referent in the mental model of the discourse. We interpret the earlier findings as an indication of an information structural difference which is specifically relevant on the discourse level. The question we address here is twofold. Firstly, we ask whether the assumed opposition in the information status of P- and D-PRO referents has consequences on referent continuation in the ongoing discourse. So far, the effects of P- vs. D-PRO use were determined concerning the status of the pronoun referent in the actual sequence of discourse, i.e. they were determined by a judgement on the salience or the topic/focus status of the pronominal DP. As far as we can see, this determination has not been operationalized further. Since there are contexts in which both P- and D-PRO would fit in with only a feeling of a difference but without clear-cut exclusiveness, the opposition is empirically not well validated. If we could show that there are effects of type of pronoun on the ongoing discourse this would, in our view, provide the lacking empirical validation. Secondly, we ask whether there are effects of the narrator's point of view on P- and D-PRO use. The idea behind this question is that the way of information unfolding in discourse depends on the speaker. S/he decides which pieces of information come next, what is foreground and what is background information. If type of pronoun choice is related to the processes of discourse organization by the speaker – via fore- and backgrounding of information – and if internal or external location of the narrator's point of view influences the organization strategies of the speaker/narrator this might have an ffect on the use of P- and D-PRO.

Promoting Aspects Of Discourse Macrostructure And Microstructure In EFL Expository Writing Through Reading :, A Case Study Of Second Year Constantine University 1 Students

The present study sets out to investigate the extent to which comprehension of discourse structure levels accounts for competence in EFL writing organization. More specifically, it seeks to enhance the students’ awareness regarding the significance of the macrostructure and microstructure notions in writing through reading as a main source of language input and accumulation. The study has been conducted with two writing classes assigned to an experimental group and a control group. To compare the subjects’ performance in terms of the effective use of some aspects of discourse structure levels, a pre-test prior to a treatment and a post-test after the treatment have been administered in the form of in-class expository essays. Following the collection of the post-test essays, a questionnaire has been given to the experimental group subjects to elicit their opinions about the role of reading in the comprehension of discourse structure levels. The findings of the study have demonstrated a significant improvement of the experimental group in all aspects of discourse structure, while the control group has actually lowered its scores on some aspects and made insignificant improvement in others. Ultimately, the study has indicated that reading could be the best technique to develop the sense of discourse organization.

Diachronic extension of Linguistic Inventory Mightiness

It is widely believed that the order of morphosyntactic elements in Modern Chinese is to a large extent constrained by the Principle of Temporal Sequence (PTS) proposed by Tai (1985, 2002, 2007). However, there are indeed some constructions in this language apparently deviating from PTS, e.g. 蹲到 dūn-dào ‘squat-to; go to squat’, with the two elements reverse-chronological. In the present paper I provide instead a new diachronic perspective, in the framework of Linguistic Inventory Mightiness (LIM) developed recently by Liu (2011, 2012), to account for constructions of this kind. I argue that it is the diachronic extension of the directional resultative-verb-compound (DRVC) pattern, since it shows the property of LIM that motivates the emergence of reverse-chronological constructions. It is argued that the LIM approach can also explain other related diachronic changes in the history of Chinese, e.g. 摸进 mō-jìn ‘touch-enter; enter accompanied by action of touching’, with the first verb being an static action verb originally but now having a manner-of-motion meaning in the construction, as well as the constructions of 回到 huí-dào ‘return-to’ and 进来 jìn-lái ‘enter-come’ which do not exist before Pre-Modern Chinese but emerge to be in use thereafter. The approach proposed in the present paper favors a two-fold standpoint, i.e. the organization of linguistic structure on the one hand follows cognitive principles, but on the other impact and constrain related conceptual organization in discourse as well.