Minimal Answers

This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the acquisition of the syntax-discourse interface. It provides evidence that children acquiring European Portuguese have a very early ability to spontaneously produce VP ellipsis as answers to yes-no questions. It is also argued that the distribution of VP ellipsis in European Portuguese (including its co-existence with Null Complement Anaphora) supports the hypothesis that the identification condition on ellipsis is derivable from some innate knowledge of the syntax-discourse interface. Answers to yes-no questions also provide evidence concerning children’s interpretation of questions containing a cleft or the operator só ‘only’. The analysis of spontaneous production is complemented by a comprehension experiment, showing that children have two problems in the interpretation of these questions: (i) they do not understand that the cleft and só introduce a presupposition and (ii) they start with a default focus assignment strategy and may not access other focus interpretations.

Discourse markers - the particles oh, well, now, then, you know and I mean, and the connectives so, because, and, but and or - perform important functions in conversation. Dr Schiffrin's approach is firmly interdisciplinary, within linguistics and sociology, and her rigourous analysis clearly demonstrates that neither the markers, nor the discourse within which they function, can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. The core of the book is a comparative analysis of markers within conversational discourse collected by Dr Schiffrin during sociolinguistic fieldwork. The study concludes that markers provide contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation at both local and global levels of organization. It raises a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues important to discourse analysis - including the relationship between meaning and use, the role of qualitative and quantitative analyses - and the insights it offers will be of particular value to readers confronting the very substantial problems presented by the search for a model of discourse which is based on what people actually say, mean, and do with words in everyday social interaction.

These conference papers cover the 6th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications. They examine topics such as the World Wide Web, workflow management and specification management, visualization and multimedia databases, spatial databases, and index techniques."

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, PADL 2013, held in Rome, Italy, in January 2013, co-located with POPL 2013, the 40th Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. The 17 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. The volume features original work emphasizing new ideas and implementation techniques for all forms of declarative concepts, including functional, logic and constraints.

Based on research focusing on the experience of having confused speech and being with confused speakers, this book begins with everyday, commonly understood ideas such as "talking too much" and examines how confused speech is "brought off" as a collaborative activity by the people involved. The author became involved in this project because she was interested in how "confusion" seemed to be something that everyone is not only involved in but also recognizes as part of ordinary life. At the same time, "confusion" is a word that is used somewhat as a blanket category for some people considered permanently incompetent and "set apart" from ordinary members of society. Her study analyzes how talk between confused and normal speakers throws light on this tension.

The act of questioning is the primary speech interaction between an institutional speaker and someone outside the institution. These roles dictate their language practices. "Why Do You Ask?" is the first collected volume to focus solely on the question/answer process, drawing on a range of methodological approaches like Conversational Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Discursive Psychology, and Sociolinguistics-and using as data not just medical, legal, and educational environments, but also less-studied institutions like telephone call centers, broadcast journalism (i.e. talk show interviews), academia, and telemarketing. An international roster of well-known contributors addresses such issues as: the relationship between the syntax of the question and its discourse function; the kind of institutional work that questions perform; the degree to which the questioner can control the direction of the conversation; and how questions are used to repackage responses, to construct meaning, and to serve the institutional goals of speakers. Why Do You Ask? will appeal to linguists and others interested in institutional discourse, as well as those interested in the grammatical/pragmatic nature of questions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods, TABLEAUX'99, held in Saratoga Springs, NY, USA, in June 1999. The volume presents 18 revised full papers and three system descriptions selected from 41 submissions. Also included are system comparisons and abstracts of an invited paper and of two tutorials. All current issues surrounding mechanization of reasoning with tableaux and similar methods are addressed - ranging from theoretical foundations to implementation and systems development and applications, as well as covering a broad variety of logic calculi. As application areas, formal verification of software and computer systems, deductive databases, knowledge representation, and systems diagnosis are covered.