This dissertation addresses the limited measures available to conduct comparative linguistic analysis across spoken, written and eDiscourse environments and proposes a new measure—the new/given index. The new/given construct of Halliday and Clark is reviewed as well as the relevant literature of eDiscourse and other persistent electronic communication. A data set of writing samples, face to face meeting transcripts, and electronic conferences is assembled and used to test and validate the new/given index. The data are reviewed and scored by raters for new and given material and the rater scores are compared with the score generated by the new/given index software parser. The data suggest that the new/given index reliably reports the presence of new and given information in processed text and provides a measure of the efficiency with which this text is resolved or grounded in discourse. The data are further processed by the software parser and aggregate new/given indices for the data types are generated. This analysis reveals that statistically significant differences between the new/give index of written text, transcriptions of face to face discussion, and eDiscourse conferencing transcripts exist. Finally, a qualitative analysis based on interviews with the creators of the data set explore their experience in the eDiscourse conferencing environment and the relation between individual behavior in a group problem-solving situation and an individuals new/given index in an eDiscourse environment. The study concludes with suggestions for the application of the new/given index in eDiscourse and other persistent electronic communication environments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-2131 |
| Date | 01 January 2002 |
| Creators | Welts, Dana Raymond |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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