John O’Malley, S.J.’s emphasis on rhetoric challenges students to reconsider not only the significance of history in relation St. Ignatius’ texts, but also importance their own discourses. In this essay, I focus one specific event Acts, an replete with rhetorical, textual, biblical (both New Testament and Tanakh, Hebrew scriptures), historical considerations, which, surprisingly, does appear as...

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 paper argues for more precise deenitions of rhetorical relations that have often been proposed as intermediate forms between modules of text generators. As a case in point, we describe the problems we encountered when we combined two text generator systems that we initially thought were complementary: one dealt with \what to say?" and the other with the \how to say?". This experiment broug...

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.

We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.