Computational and Conversational Discourse Burning Issues — An Interdisciplinary Account

People engage in discourse every day - from writing letters and presenting papers to simple discussions. Yet discourse is a complex and fascinating phenomenon that is not well understood. This volume stems from a multidisciplinary workshop in which eminent scholars in linguistics, sociology and computational linguistics presented various aspects of discourse. The topics treated range from multi-party conversational interactions to deconstructing text from various perspectives, considering topic-focus development and discourse structure, and an empirical study of discourse segmentation. The chapters not only describe each author's favorite burning issue in discourse but also provide a fascinating view of the research methodology and style of argumentation in each field.

1 Issues of Relevance for Discourse Analysis: Contingency in Action, Interaction, and Co-Participant Context.- 2 Types of Structure: Deconstructing Notions of Constituency in Clause and Text.- 3 Interaction and Syntax in the Structure of Conversational Discourse: Collaboration, Overlap, and Syntactic Dissociation.- 4 The Information Structure of the Sentence and the Coherence of Discourse.- 5 Discourse Coherence and Segmentation.- 6 On the Relation Between the Informational and Intentional Perspectives on Discourse.- 7 Empirical Analysis of Three Dimensions of Spoken Discourse: Segmentation, Coherence, and Linguistic Devices.- Authors’ Biographies.