The Grammar of Discourse

The Content Types Dataset: a New Resource to Explore Semantic and Functional Characteristics of Texts

“…CTs are based on linguistic theories on discourse/rhetorical strategies but differ from discourse relations. Over the years, different typologies have been proposed (Werlich, 1976;Biber, Content- 1989;Chatman, 1990;Adam, 1985;Longacre, 2013) but have been rarely treated computationally, with the exception of the work by Cocco et al (2011).…”

Topic and Discourse Structure in West Greenlandic Agreement Constructions

“…Few syntacticians, typologists, or functional grammarians actually define this term, assuming, one supposes, that it is generally understood. Many use it interchangeably with 'topic', as do Dixon (1994) and Du Bois (1987), for example; some use it in the sense in which others use 'topic', as do Brown and Yule (1983:135) and Longacre (1996). Grimes (1975:103 and 324) uses it in a number of ways, including as the starting point of the message, as the topic, and as an element of the organization of the text; and to confuse matters, he uses the terms in ways standard to non-linguistic fields (such as 'topic sentence') but inconsistently with his discussion.…”

`There's Something It's Like' and the Structure of Consciousness

“…For example, the sentence 'Brutus stabbed Caesar' concerns a certain stabbing, of which Brutus's semantic role is that of agent, while Caesar's is that of patient (note the relative richness of instigating versus suffering by comparison with saturating the first versus the second argument place of a polyadic property). A further such semantic role is "experiencer," which is filled by the entity that undergoes a certain phenomenally conscious experience of a certain occurrence (Longacre 1983). It may be that in 'e is F for s', the semantic function of 'for' is to indicate that the semantic value of its complement ('s') is the experiencer of some state, namely e's being F (Glanzberg n.d.).…”