Vagueness, Unspecificity, and Approximation. Cognitive and lexical aspects in English, Swedish, and Italian.

The paper investigates the cognitive and semantic nature of vagueness, unspecificity, and approximation (vagueness related phenomena) by examining some of the linguistic expressions connected with these phenomena in English, Swedish and Italian. Certain mental states during discourse production (like hesitation, hastiness, word search) are also investigated

The analysis of embodied communicative feedback in multimodal corpora: a prerequisite for behavior simulation

Abstract Communicative feedback refers to unobtrusive (usually short) vocal or bodily expressions whereby a recipient of information can inform a contributor of information about whether he/she is able and willing to communicate, perceive the information, and understand the information. This paper provides a theory for embodied communicative feedback, describing the different dimensions and features involved. It also provides a corpus analysis part, describing a first data coding and analysis method geared to find the features postulated by the theory. The corpus analysis part describes different methods and statistical procedures and discusses their applicability and the possible insights gained with these methods