Discourse Function & Syntactic Form in Natural Language Generation (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780415971041)

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.

Author: Cassandre Creswell
ISBN-10: 0415971047
ISBN-13: 9780415971041
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 11/22/2004
Pages: 194
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.34w x 0.65d