In order to provide a principled foundation for the study of discourse, in this paper we propose answers to three basic questions: What are the atomic units of discourse? What kind of structures can be built from the elementary units? How do we interpret the resulting structures semantically? Inferences and the correct interpretation of deixis and anaphors in discourse depend upon both structural and semantic accessibility relations. Structurally, we argue, discourse is context free and accessibility is determined by the coordination and subordination relations specified by the model of discourse presented here. Semantically, accessibility is controlled by relations among a number of modal contexts (interaction, speech event, genre unit, modality, polarity, and point of view) which determine the discourse world relative to which each primitive discourse unit is interpreted. To demonstrate the validity of our approach, the linguistic discourse model developed here is applied to a problem concerning the distribution of a discourse particle in Mocho and to various problems of discourse interpretation.

This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects of these abilities have been separately considered in the literatures on “theory of mind”, Gricean pragmatics and quotation. The aim of this paper is to show how the results of these separate strands of research might be integrated with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory. 1

We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text’s opinion towards its main subject matter. We show that SO-CAL’s performance is consistent across domains and in completely unseen data. Additionally, we describe the process of dictionary creation, and our use of Mechanical Turk to check dictionaries for consistency and reliability. 1.

This essay attempts to develop a psychologically informed semantics of perception reports, whose predictions match with the linguistic data. As suggested by the quotation from Miller and Johnson-Laird, we take a hallmark of perception to be its fallible nature; the resulting semantics thus necessarily differs from situation semantics. On the psychological side, our main inspiration is Marr's (1982) theory of vision, which can easily accomodate fallible perception. In Marr's theory, vision is a multi-layered process. The different layers have filters of different gradation, wkich makes vision at each of them approximate. On the logical side, our task is therefore twofold to fomalise the layers and the ways in which they may refine each other, and to develop logical means to let description vary with such degrees of refinement.

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This paper addresses a sensitive issue, of presence experienced by people interactingwith a virtual environment (VE). Understanding‘presence’, both theoretically and empirically, is important for designers interested in building effective computer-mediated environments for learningand work activities. The concept of presence has been treated mostly as a state of mind, to be investigated through ‘objective ’ and ‘subjective ’ measurement devices. The authors propose to add a different approach, which can address presence as an action-based process. This approach considers presence as the ongoing result of the actions performed in an environment and the local and cultural resources deployed by actors. In this sense, ‘presence’ can be captured by monitoringthe sequence of participants ’ actions and the aspects of the environment that are involved in this process; discourse/interaction analysis represents a fittingmethod for this goal. Sequences of interaction with a virtual library are used to illustrate some core aspects of an ethnographic, action-based approach to presence, such as the action possibilities envisaged by participants, the configuration of the virtual objects, the norms that regulate the interaction, the resources that are imported in the VE. These aspects are a necessary step to understand users ’ presence in the VE and to plan consequent interventions to

this paper was partially supported by NIH Grant # F32 MH65020-A1

This paper deals with the semantics of the Evidential marker in Northern Ostyak. As far as I know, the semantics of grammaticalized Evidentials has not been studied in detail for the (eastern) Uralic languages, although in the modal system of some of them the Evidential category plays an important role. I will analyze the different meanings of the Ostyak Evidentials, and suggest that the apparent variety of meanings can be deduced from one basic prototype. This model, I believe, may have a descriptive cross-linguistic value. Furthermore, it supports two points sometimes raised in the linguistic literature: that the Evidentials should be treated separately from the epistemics; and that often they go back historically to the Perfect. The paper is organized in the following way. In section 1 I present the morphology of the Ostyak Evidentials and previous proposals about them. Section 2 outlines the role of Evidentials in modal systems in general. Central to the paper is section 3, where I suggest a core of semantics for the Evidential markers. More detailed examples will be given in sections 4 and 5, and independent arguments supporting it will be given in section 6. Section 7 discusses the relationship between the Evidential and the Perfect. Unless indicated otherwise, I refer to the data that I myself collected during expeditions between

This paper will present some very general descriptions of language-specific conceptualization of visual perception in English and Lithuanian, and will focus on some basic structure-dependent types of meaning of the see and seem type perception verbs in English and Lithuanian. For this purpose, the hierarchical structure of the clause and the typology of perception verb complements proposed by Simon C. Dik and Kees Hengeveld 1991, and the concept of entities discussed in the works of John Lyons 1977, 1991 will be followed in the analysis undertaken. A distinction will be drawn between experiential and non-experiential types of perception, with only the latter one being considered to convey information which is loaded with some modal qualifications. I will keep to the definition of the concept of

Cognitive research on metaphoric concepts of time has focused on differences between moving Ego and moving time models, but even more basic is the contrast between Ego- and temporal-reference-point models. Dynamic models appear to be quasi-universal cross-culturally, as does the generalization that in Ego-reference-point models, FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. The Aymara language instead has a major static model of time wherein FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO; linguistic and gestural data give strong confirmation of this unusual culture-specific cognitive pattern. Gestural data provide crucial information unavailable to purely linguistic analysis, suggesting that when investigating conceptual systems both forms of expression should be analyzed complementarily. Important issues in embodied cognition are raised: how fully shared are bodily grounded motivations for universal cognitive patterns, what makes a rare pattern emerge, and what are the cultural entailments of such patterns?