Genre Distinctions and Discourse Modes: Text Types Differ in their Situation Type Distributions
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this paper we explore the relationship between the genre of a text and the types of situations introduced by the clauses of the text, working from the perspective of the theory of discourse modes (Smith, 2003). The typology of situation types distinguishes between, for example, events, states, generic statements, and speech acts. We analyze texts of different genres from two English text corpora, the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB) and the Manually Annotated SubCorpus (MASC) of the Open American National Corpus. Texts of different types – genres in the PDTB and subcorpora in MASC – are segmented into clauses, and each clause is labeled with the type of situation it introduces to the discourse. We then compare the distribution of situation types across different text types, finding systematic differences across genres. Our findings support predictions of the discourse modes theory and offer new insights into the relationship between text types and situation type distributions.
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