Discourse Function & Syntactic Form in Natural Language Generation

By Cassandre Creswell

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138990779
• ISBN13: 9781138990777
• Release Date: July 2016
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"