Discourse Function & Syntactic Form in Natural Language Generation

✍ Scribed by Cassandre Creswell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 179
• Series: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
• Edition: annotated edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Users of natural languages have many word orders with which to encode the same truth-conditional meaning. They choose contextually appropriate strings from these many ways with little conscious effort and with effective communicative results. Previous computational models of when English speakers produce non-canonical word orders, like topicalization, left-dislocation and clefts, fail. The primary goal of this book is to present a better model of when speakers choose to produce certain non-canonical word orders by incorporating the effects of discourse context and speaker goals on syntactic choice. This book makes extensive use of previously unexamined naturally occurring corpus data of non-canonical word order in English, both to illustrate the points of the theoretical model and to train the statistical model.

✦ Table of Contents

Book Cover......Page 1
Series Title......Page 4
Title......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Dedications......Page 7
Acknowledgements......Page 9
Contents......Page 11
List of Figures......Page 12
List of Tables......Page 14
1. Introduction......Page 18
2. Background: Previous Work and Relevant Theory......Page 31
3. A Goal-based Model of Syntactic Choice......Page 67
4. An Empirical Study of Discourse Structure and Non-canonical Word Order......Page 95
5. Conclusions and Future Directions......Page 160
Bibliography......Page 164
Index......Page 172