Coherence relations between elements of discourse can be signaled by linguistic devices such as connectives and/or alternative signals. While the use and comprehension of connectives have been studied in different categories of speakers, less is known about the functioning of alternative signals of coherence relations, especially in younger populations. In the current study, we aim to examine the sensitivity of French-speaking teenagers to the alternative signals of list relation (words such as plusieurs ‘several’ and différents ‘various’), combined with connectives varying in frequency and signaling two types of coherence relations (addition: en plus, en outre; consequence: donc, ainsi). Our results reveal that, as early as in teenage years, speakers are sensitive (i.e., they produce list continuation sentences) to alternative signals of list relation. Furthermore, the inference of list relation is not significantly changed when an alternative signal is combined with the more frequent additive connective en plus. However, this inference is inhibited by the less frequent additive connective en outre, and is almost completely hindered by the consequence connectives donc and ainsi. Overall, these results show that alternative list signals are an important source for the inference of the list relation, even in the presence of more salient signals of coherence such as connectives.

Connectives convey discourse functions that provide textual and pragmatic information in speech communication on top of canonical, sentential use. This paper proposes an applicable scheme with illustrative examples for distinguishing Sentential, Conclusion, Disfluency, Elaboration, and Resumption uses of Mandarin connectives, including conjunctions and adverbs. Quantitative results of our annotation works are presented to gain an overview of connectives in a Mandarin conversational speech corpus. A fine-grained taxonomy is also discussed, but it requires more empirical data to approve the applicability. By conducting a multinomial logistic regression model, we illustrate that connectives exhibit consistent patterns in positional, phonetic, and contextual features oriented to the associated discourse functions. Our results confirm that the position of Conclusion and Resumption connectives orient more to positions in semantically, rather than prosodically, determined units. We also found that connectives used for all four discourse functions tend to have a higher initial F0 value than those of sentential use. Resumption and Disfluency uses are expected to have the largest increase in initial F0 value, followed by Conclusion and Elaboration uses. Durational cues of the preceding context enable distinguishing Sentential use from discourse uses of Conclusion, Elaboration, and Resumption of connectives.

Two picture-matching-game experiments investigated if lexical-referential alignment to non-native speakers is enhanced by a desire to aid communicative success (by saying something the conversation partner can certainly understand), a form of audience design. In Experiment 1, a group of native speakers of British English that was not given evidence of their conversation partners’ picture-matching performance showed more alignment to non-native than to native speakers, while another group that was given such evidence aligned equivalently to the two types of speaker. Experiment 2, conducted with speakers of Castilian Spanish, replicated the greater alignment to non-native than native speakers without feedback. However, Experiment 2 also showed that production of grammatical errors by the confederate produced no additional increase of alignment even though making errors suggests lower communicative competence. We suggest that this pattern is consistent with another collaborative strategy, the desire to model correct usage. Together, these results support a role for audience design in alignment to non-native speakers in structured task-based dialogue, but one that is strategically deployed only when deemed necessary.

Learning suitable and well-performing dialogue behaviour in statistical spoken dialogue systems has been in the focus of research for many years. While most work that is based on reinforcement learning employs an objective measure like task success for modelling the reward signal, we propose to use a reward signal based on user satisfaction. We propose a novel estimator and show that it outperforms all previous estimators while learning temporal dependencies implicitly. We show in simulated experiments that a live user satisfaction estimation model may be applied resulting in higher estimated satisfaction whilst achieving similar success rates. Moreover, we show that a satisfaction estimation model trained on one domain may be applied in many other domains that cover a similar task. We verify our findings by employing the model to one of the domains for learning a policy from real users and compare its performance to policies using user satisfaction and task success acquired directly from the users as reward.


 This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian, which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres.

While some recent studies on Spanish have shown that some causal discourse markers specialize in expressing certain types of causal relations, others have revealed that causal relations may be signaled by a variety of linguistic devices. Given that we were interested not only in specificity and variety, but also in the (poly) functionality of signals, our objective in the present study was threefold. First, to identify the variety of markers used to signal causal relations in Spanish. Second, to describe the (poly) functionality of those causal markers. Third, to determine whether there exists a relationship of specificity between markers and particular types of causal relations. We analyzed a corpus of 2,514 causal coherence relations previously annotated. 40 different linguistic devices used to signal causal relations were identified. These devices were grouped into two main classes: Discourse Markers and Cue Phrases. Regarding the (poly) functionality of the markers, we found that 8 of the most frequent markers were used to signal different relations. Regarding specificity, it was observed that various conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs specialize in signaling specific relations.

Everyday communication is enriched by the visual environment that listeners concomitantly link to the linguistic input. If and when visual cues are integrated into the mental meaning representation of the communicative setting, is still unclear. In our earlier findings, the integration of linguistic cues (i.e., topic-hood of a discourse referent) reduced discourse updating costs of the mental representation as indicated by reduced sentence-initial processing costs of the non-canonical word order in German. In the present study we tried to replicate our earlier findings by replacing the linguistic cue by a visual attention-capture cue presented below the threshold of perception in order to direct participant’s attention to a depicted referent. While this type of cue has previously been shown to modulate word order preferences in sentence production, we found no effects on sentence comprehension. We discuss possible theory-based reasons for the null effect of the implicit visual cue as well as methodological caveats and issues that should be considered in future research on multimodal meaning integration.

The Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations (Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992) was originally proposed as a set of cognitively plausible primitives to order coherence relations, but is also increasingly used as a discourse annotation scheme. This paper provides an overview of new CCR distinctions that have been proposed over the years, summarizes the most important discussions about the operationalization of the primitives, and introduces a new distinction (disjunction) to the taxonomy to improve the descriptive adequacy of CCR. In addition, it reflects on the use of the CCR as an annotation scheme in practice. The overall aim of the paper is to provide an overview of state-of-the-art CCR for discourse annotation that can form, together with the original 1992 proposal, a comprehensive starting point for anyone interested in annotating discourse using CCR.

In Discourse Studies concessions are considered among those argumentative strategies that increase persuasion. We aim to empirically test this hypothesis by calculating the distribution of argumentative concessions in persuasive vs. non-persuasive comments from the the ChangeMyView subreddit. This constitutes a challenging task since concessions do not always bear an argumentative role and are expressed through polysemous lexical markers. Drawing from a theoretically-informed typology of concessions, we first conduct a crowdsourcing task to label a set of polysemous lexical markers as introducing an argumentative concession relation or not. Second, we present a self-training method to automatically identify argumentative concessions using linguistically motivated features. While we achieve a moderate F1 of 57.4% via the self-training method, our subsequent error analysis highlights that the self training method is able to generalize and identify other types of concessions that are argumentative, but were not considered in the annotation guidelines. Our findings from the manual labeling and the classification experiments indicate that the type of argumentative concessions we investigated is almost equally likely to be used in winning and losing arguments. While this result seems to contradict theoretical assumptions, we provide some reasons related to the ChangeMyView subreddit.

This study explores strategies in pro and anti-shale organizations’ discourse by combining the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak, 2001) with corpus linguistics. With the help of keyword lists, collocations, concordances, and key semantic domains, the representations of shale gas extraction, relevant actors and argumentation schemes in opposing discourses of the pro-shale Marcellus Shale Coalition and anti-shale Americans Against Fracking were analyzed. The findings of the study show that the advocates presented shale gas as a bonus for the crisis-struck American society while backgrounding its environmental impacts. The opponents, on the other hand, represented shale gas as a threat to the American ecosystem and public health through an alarming and scientific discourse. The empirical findings of this study add to a growing body of literature on discursive strategies employed by opposing camps of environmental controversies.