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Cursus: TLRMV16107
TLRMV16107
Discourse, Cognition and Communication
Cursus informatie
CursuscodeTLRMV16107
Studiepunten (EC)5
Cursusdoelen
After succesfully completing this course, students
* have an overview of the field of discourse studies and discourse processing, as well as of the leading questions in the field;
* can formulate specific research questions and operationalizations of research that contributes to the field
* are able to present these issues in an understandable and challenging way;
* are able to relate research on language use and discourse representation to issues of optimal communication.
Inhoud
Language users communicate through discourse. The constituting property of discourse is that it shows connectedness. This connectedness is a cognitive phenomenon: Language users make a coherent representation of the discourse under consideration. The discourse itself contains (more or less) overt signals that direct this interpretation process.

Discourse coherence manifests itself in referential coherence (anaphora, pronouns, discourse topics) and in coherence relations, such as Cause-Consequence and Contrast. These relations are conceptual and they can be made explicit by linguistic markers, so-called connectives (because, so, however) and lexical cue phrases (The result is, In conclusion).

First, we investigate the way in which various languages express coherence. Detailed corpus studies - of languages like English, Dutch, German, French, Russian and Chinese - provide interesting information on cross-linguistic similarities and differences. Second, the cognitive part studies the way language users process and represent these discourse structures during on-line processing and comprehension experiments; this part includes basic training in the design and analysis of processing experiments employing eye-tracking methodology. We will also investigate the way in which children learn to communicate on the discourse level. Finally, we discuss the implications for communication: how can we design texts that are optimally designed for effective communication?
    
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