Background: Given the integral role that verbs play in sentence production, understanding verb deficits is critical to clinical practice. Difficulties in sentence production are often directly related to an inability to retrieve argument structure information which, according to most theoretical accounts, is specified at a lexical level as part of…

What is the relation between factual conditionals: "If A happened then B happened," and counterfactual conditionals: "If A had happened then B would have happened?" Some theorists propose quite different semantics for the two. In contrast, the theory of mental models and its computer implementation interrelates them. It…

This paper considers the anaphoric status of the pro-form "fer-ho" (do it) in Catalan [This paper contains some ideas included in Busquets (2005)]. I discuss some anaphoric properties of "fer-ho" as deep anaphora. I also compare these properties to those of other types of anaphora, like VPE and pseudogapping (pg). I show that…

This study aims to investigate the differences in the realization of request speech act between the IEL (Indonesian English Learners) and the AES (Australian English-Native Speakers), as well as explain the factors influencing these distinctions. The descriptive-qualitative method and discourse completion task (DCT) were used to obtain data in…

Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false. Successful counterfactual comprehension therefore requires people to keep in mind both an imagined hypothetical world and the presupposed real world. "Counterfactual transparency," that is, the degree to which a context makes it easy to determine…

Many sentences of adult English are analytic constructions, namely clauses with a matrix verb complemented by a dependent predicate that does not have an expressed syntactic subject. Examples are subject and object control, raising to subject or object, periphrastic tense, aspect and modality, copular predication and "do"-support. In…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

According to one view of linguistic information (Karttunen, 1974; Stalnaker, 1974), a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: (a) by "asserting" the content as new information; or (b) by "presupposing" the content as given information which would then have to be "accommodated." This…

This dissertation uses a corpus of tokens retrieved from broadcast news stories and print news articles to examine the array of constructions used to encode stative predications in Modern Standard Arabic. A state is defined as a situation that includes its reference time, whether that time is encoding time or another time of orientation. A range…

In two studies we examined the extent to which skilled and less-skilled reasoners of arguments relied on relevance relations (semantic and logical relatedness) between claims and reasons when evaluating arguments. College students, selected as having high or low analytical reasoning skill, evaluated the quality of a set of two sentence arguments…

The goal of this study is to characterize the temporal phenomena in the Korean conjunctive constructions. These constructions consist of three components: a verbal stem, a clause medial temporal suffix, and a clause terminal suffix. This study focuses on both the temporality of the terminal connective suffixes and the grammatical meanings of the…

This study investigates the use of anadiplosis in both English and Arabic. It focuses primarily on outlining and defining the so-called "reduced" anadiplosis in some Quranic verses. The study investigates, too, the most popular English translations of them, highlighting the mismatches between the original holy text and its translations.…

This article investigates the lexical and discourse features of English text and discourse with automated computer technologies. Specifically, this article examines the cohesion of English text and discourse with automated computer tools, Coh-Metrix and TEES. Coh-Metrix is a text analysis computer tool that can analyze English text and discourse…

Many philosophers believe that if "S" is an unambiguous, context-sensitive, declarative sentence and "p" is a proposition asserted (without conversational implicatures) by a literal utterance of "S" in a context "c," then "p" is fully determined by the linguistic meaning of "S" in…

Purpose: Prior studies of discourse comprehension have concluded that the deficits of persons with aphasia (PWA) in syntactically based comprehension of sentences in isolation are not predictive of deficits in comprehension of sentences in discourse (Brookshire & Nicholas, 1984; Caplan & Evans, 1990). However, these studies used semantically…