This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they...

  Translation of the Holy Quran can be difficult for translators in terms of accuracy and translatability. Sometimes translators fail to render the Quranic thoughts because of the lack of language features in target languages. This results in an unfavorable interpretation. One of the challenging aspects of translating Quran is reference switching as rhetorical devices, which are widespread i...

This paper investigates patterns of rhetorical convergence and divergence in pairs of RA abstracts (English-Spanish and Spanish-English) published in the journal Ibérica. To that end, a total of 84 pairs of author-translated RA abstracts were analyzed. Based on the results of a pilot study, the following rhetorical patterns were analyzed in the corpus: text-referring expressions, degree of epis...

I use the distinction between the nuclei and the satellites that pertain to discourse relations to introduce a compositionality criterion for discourse trees. I provide a first-order formalization of rhetorical structure trees and, on its basis, I derive an algorithm that constructs all the valid rhetorical trees that can be associated with a given discourse.

This study aimed at investigating the impact of writing on Iranian EFL college students’ rhetorical organization. Thirty Iranian female undergraduate students majoring in English at Al-zahra University participated in the current study. The writing instructions included two stages, each lasting for four weeks. The participants were assigned to a control group and an experimental group according...

In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. Metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one...

This paper introduces the first Basque discourse TreeBank annotated with rhetorical relations following Rhetorical Structure Theory. We report the main features of the corpus, such as the annotation criteria, inter-annotator agreement and harmonization procedure. We describe an online search system to check the annotation of discourse relations.

In this paper we report on several issues arising out of a first attempt to annotate task-oriented spoken dialog for rhetorical structure using Rhetorical Structure Theory. We discuss an annotation scheme we are developing to resolve the difficulties we have encountered.