Discourse Function & Syntactic Form in Natural Language Generation

ISBN-13: 9780415971041 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 194 str.

Cassandre Creswell; Creswell Creswell; Cassandre Creswell

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements Tables Figures Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Background: Previous Work and Relevant Theory Chapter 3: A Goal-Based Model of Syntactic Choice Chapter 4: An Empirical Study of Discourse Structure and Non-Canonical Word Order Chapter 5: Conclusions and Future Directions Bibliography Index

O autorze

Cassandre Creswell earned her B.A. in linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a M.S.E. in computer and information science and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently resides in Toronto, Canada.