How is affect communicated in language? Natural languages contain a large number oftechniques for injecting affect into text, both explicitly and implicitly. This paper discussessome techniques that speakers use to slant their text, and describes what is required for acomputer program to generate differently slanted versions of a single underlying representation.

This paper addresses part of the question "how do we say the same thing in different ways in order to communicate non-literal, pragmatic information?". Since the style of the text can communicate much information — it may be stuffy, slangy, prissy — generators that seek to satisfy pragmatic, hearer-related goals in addition to simple informative ones must have rules that control how and when different styles are used. But what is "style" ? In this paper,formal and informal language is analysed to provide stylistic rules that enable a program to produce texts of various levels of formahty

this paper we outline the first steps of an investigation of the nature of representations information, an investigation that uses as a starting point the various ways in which people tend to communicate different kinds of information. Our hope is that by identifying the regularities of presentation, in particular by finding out when people decide to switch presentation modalities and what they tlien tend to do, we will be able to shed light on the nature of the underlying representations and processes of communication between people.

In multisentence texts, the order and interrelationships of sentence topics is of crucial importance if the reader is to understand easily. What makes paragraphs coherent? What strategies do people employ to control the presentation order and linking of material? Without a theory of coherence, text generation systems have little hope of producing acceptable texts. While various theories of text coherence have been developed, no single theory captures all the phenomena of human-generated paragraphs. In this paper we argue that the coherence of a paragraph does not result from the application of a single theory, but instead results from the cooperation of a number of different coherence strategies. W e illustrate this claim by showing how two very different theories about the planning of coherent text — 1) Rhetorical Structure Theory, based on structural and semantic relationships that hold between pieces of the text, and 2) Focus Trees, based on how the focus of attention shifts during discourse — can be used within a single system to complement each other to best advantage.