Syntactic Form and Discourse Function in Natural Language Generation

by Cassandre Creswell

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415971041
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/22/2004
Series:	Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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