This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the na,ture of discourse relatiolls il" we better understood what units of a text. can be related to one a.nother. In Olle ma.jor theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann &: Thompson 1988; Imrea.l'ter simply RS'T), the smallest possible linguistic units tha...

In this paper, we propose a Connectivedriven Dependency Tree (CDT) scheme to represent the discourse rhetorical structure in Chinese language, with elementary discourse units as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes, largely motivated by the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory. In particular, connectives are employed to directly represent the hierarchy of the tree...

Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical functions that go beyond that of simple informational exchange. The surface form of a question can signal the intention and background of the person asking it, as well as the nature of their relation with the interlocutor. While the informational nature of questions has been extensively examined in the context of ques...

The IMAGENE project has studied the expression of actions in the context of instructional text generation. The approach employs a rather traditional interpretation of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson, 1989), using it both as a descriptive tool and as a constructive tool (Mann and Thompson, 1987). No explicit representation of and reasoning about intentions was employed. In t...

This article unravels how fair trade organizations use social impact disclosures as forms of symbolic power amid stakeholder concerns that prevail in the field. Mobilizing Bourdieu’s notion and through narrative analysis associated rhetoric major UK organizations, well their stakeholders’ persuasive arguments public domain during period from 2006 to 2013, we show these position themselves domin...

Audience metadiscourse refers to the speech choices made by speakers indicate their metapragmatic awareness of audience. It encompasses expressions including directly referring audience as “you” and “we”, generic expressions, imperative rhetorical interrogative expressions. This study primarily focuses on describing analyzing representational forms, pragmatic functions, different reflected in s...

Empirical studies of text coherence often use tree-like structures in the spirit of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as representational device. This paper identifies several sources of ambiguity in RST-inspired trees and argues that such structures are therefore not as explanatory as a text representation should be. As an alternative, an approach toward multi-level annotation (MLA) of texts i...

This paper provides a corpus-based generic characterization of appointment-scheduling dialogues—a type of task-oriented conversation—by concentrating on the rhetorical and thematic choices made by the speakers that produce them. The analytical tools used for this study are Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the notion of Theme as defined in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Thematic Progress...

This study investigates the prosodic realization of organizational features of texts. Twenty read aloud news reports were annotated according to Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). This theory defines the clustering of elementary units (clauses) into larger segments (hierarchical organization), the relative importance of units (nuclearity) and the rhetorical relations between segments. The proso...

In this paper, we offer a novel method for processing given information in discourse, paying particular attention to definite descriptions. We argue that extant theories don’t do justice to the complexity of interaction between the knowledge resources that are used. In line with Hobbs (1979), we claim that discourse structure—as defined by the rhetorical connections between the propositions int...