This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

Through a structured examination of four English causal discourse connectives, our article tackles a gap in the existing research, which focuses mainly on written language production, and entirely lacks attests on English spoken discourse. Given the alleged general nature of English connectives commonly emphasized in the literature, the underlying…

Conversational interactants rely on each other to cooperate with ongoing actions and activities both structurally (alignment) and affectively (affiliation). They monitor one another's cooperative behaviors to detect any (potential) problems in alignment and affiliation. The present study describes one interactional strategy Japanese speakers use…

Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested…

Text social information includes the cognitive processes and social communication skills that support real or hypothetical human thought or interaction. The current measure of text social information is genre. However, genre is a limited measure because of poor operationalization, limited specificity, and overlap with structural and linguistic…

Taking a cognitive approach to genre-specific language, this corpus-based study investigated the disciplinary and paradigmatic effect on the use of a specific type of attitude markers--surprise markers--with an analytical framework informed by frame semantics. A Surprise frame was generated and then used to analyze the use of surprise markers in a…

Two experiments were conducted to examine the production and detection of common, everyday deception. Experiment 1 was a naturalistic study in which participants provided their most recent truthful and deceptive (both sent and received) text messages. Participants in Experiment 2 were asked to generate text messages that were either deceptive or…

Metaphors are recognized as bridging scientists' challenges in communication with the public. In mathematics, however, which often involves abstract concepts and relations, less attention has been paid to the role of metaphors in public communication. In this article we examine the metaphors appearing in the discourse of 10 mathematicians in five…

The constructed responses individuals generate while reading can provide insights into their coherence-building processes. The current study examined how the cohesion of constructed responses relates to performance on an integrated writing task. Participants (N = 95) completed a multiple document reading task wherein they were prompted to think…

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it…

Romantic relationships vary in quality, and the purpose of the present investigation was to examine a wide scope of linguistic variables as possible markers of this variability. Ninety-six undergraduate students within committed romantic relationships were asked to write freely about their partnership, following which they reported on relationship…

When two people interact, reference presentation is shaped with the intention of supporting addressee understanding, allowing for ease of acceptance, thus minimizing overall collaborative effort. To date, analysis of such "audience design" has focused largely on adult-adult or adult-child interaction but seldom on adult-teenager…

We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as "Concession" or "Purpose") are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we…

This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The…

This study examined the forms and functions of reformulation markers (RMs) in the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and biology to see whether there is any disciplinary variation regarding these linguistic devices and their functions in essays written by undergraduate students. To this purpose, two corpora of university students' essays…