SciPo is a system whose ultimate goal is to support novice writers in producing academic texts in Brazilian Portuguese through presentation of critiques and suggestions. Currently, it focuses on the rhetorical structure of texts, being capable of automatically detecting and criticizing the rhetorical structure of Abstract sections. We describe a system that enhances SciPo’s functionality by eva...

An important factor of argument mining in dialog or multilog data is the framing with which interlocutors put forth their arguments. By using rhetorical devices such as hedging or reference to the Common Ground, speakers relate themselves to their interlocutors, their arguments, and the ongoing discourse. Capitalizing on theoretical linguistic insights into the semantics and pragmatics of disco...

The notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in communication studies. This fuzziness has led to tensions among engineers across tenures in interpreting what constitutes communicative competence. The study seeks to investigate novice and professional engineers’ understanding of the said notion in terms of two main elements of communicative competence: linguistic and rhetorical c...

The efficacy of genre-based approach to teaching writing has been regarded as an influential practice in L2 writing pedagogy (Hyland, 2007). However, there is still gap between actual structures found in reading materials recommended as textbooks and discourse patterns recommended for L2 writing in EFL contexts, the gap which would highlight the problems of genre and rhetorical patterns for tea...

We examine how nonveridical markers and rhetorical relations contribute to the expression of Appraisal (evaluation) in discourse. First, we define nonveridicality and nonveridical contexts, following Giannakidou (Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)Veridical Dependency. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998). We then relate nonveridicality to modality, Appraisal and rhetorical relations, and present a map o...

Rhetorical figures appear frequently in the headlines of magazine ads. This paper examines the effect of repetition on ads containing two types of rhetorical figures: easyto-understand rhymes and challenging puns. The findings indicate that high levels of repetition may not be necessary when ad headlines contain such rhetorical figures, even under conditions where subjects are not directed to p...

This article offers a rhetorical design perspective on persuasive technology design, introducing Bitzer’s method of the rhetorical situation. As a case study, knowledge workers in an industrial engineering corporation are examined using Bitzer’s method. Introducing a new system, knowledge workers are to be given the task of innovating and maintaining business processes, thus contributing with c...

In this article, we present the on-line interface that we have developed for the RST Spanish Treebank, the first corpus including Spanish texts annotated with rhetorical relations. This interface allows users to consult or download the texts and their corresponding annotations. In addition, it allows carrying out several tasks over a selected subcorpus: searching statistics in terms of words, r...

Aim/Purpose: To provide a research proposal writing framework to help doctoral students argue and motivate their efforts at furthering the existing knowledge available understand some phenomenon or theory. Background: I discuss how cognitive process theory of science heuristic can lead set rhetorical moves question prompts that use develop content proposals. Methodology: searched literature on ...