Discourse

Abstract

The grammatical concepts we have seen so far apply mostly to isolated words, phrases, or sentences. Texts and conversations, either full or partial, are out of their scope. Yet to us, human readers, writers, and speakers, language goes beyond the simple sentence. It is now time to describe models and processing techniques to deal with a succession of sentences. Although analyzing texts or conversations often requires syntactic and semantic treatments, it goes further. In this chapter, we shall make an excursion to the discourse side, that is, paragraphs, texts, and documents. In the next chapter, we shall consider dialogue, that is, a spoken or written interaction between a user and a machine.