Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Latest papers

• Correlation between prosody and pragmatics: A case study of the discourse marker hālā `now' in Persian

  Soleiman Ghaderi, Moloud Asakereh, Kevin Tang · 31 July 2026

  The Persian discourse marker hālā ('now') exhibits remarkable multifunctionality, extending far beyond its temporal adverbial role to encompass a variety of pragmatic functions. This study presents a pragmatic and acoustic analysis of hālā in spoken Persian, examining 267 instances from spontaneous …

• You Talkin to Me?: A Network Analysis of Gendered Speaker-Addressee Patterns in Film Screenplays

  Samin Khan, Camilla Griffiths, Shrikanth Narayanan, Dan Jurafsky, Sabyasachee Baruah · 28 July 2026

  Objective: This paper investigates the gendered structure of speaker addressee relationships in film dialogue, asking not merely who speaks, but who is spoken to and how conversational dynamics unfold across gender lines. Methods: Using a manually annotated dataset of 4,600 directed dialogue events …

• Umm... With Transformers? Insights from Filled Pause Use across Four Slavic Parliaments

  Ivan Porupski, Branimir Dropuljić, Nikola Ljubešić · 8 July 2026

  Filled pauses (FPs) are a universal feature of spontaneous speech, yet most studies rely on small, single-language corpora, limiting the generalisability of their findings. We analyse ~4,000 hours of parliamentary speech across four related Slavic languages (Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian). FP occ…

• Politics of Questions in News: A Mixed-Methods Study of Interrogative Stances as Markers of Voice and Power

  Bros Victor, Barbini Matilde, Gerard Patrick, Gatica-Perez Daniel · 24 March 2026

  Interrogatives in news discourse have been examined in linguistics and conversation analysis, but mostly in broadcast interviews and relatively small, often English-language corpora, while large-scale computational studies of news rarely distinguish interrogatives from declaratives or differentiate …

• The geometry of online conversations and the causal antecedents of conflictual discourse

  Carlo Santagiustina, Caterina Cruciani · 18 February 2026

  This article investigates the causal antecedents of conflictual language and the geometry of interaction in online threaded conversations related to climate change. We employ three annotation dimensions, inferred through LLM prompting and averaging, to capture complementary aspects of discursive con…