Scholarly attention to Colossians in the recent past has included attention to the nature of the Colossian heresy,1 the hymn to Christ in Col. 1:15-20,2 and the literary style of Colossians generally.3 Although rhetorical studies of Colossians have appeared, comprehensive rhetorical studies which consider the letter’s invention, arrangement, and style have been few in number.4 The current artic...

The present study aimed at finding structural variations in the translated abstracts from Persian into English and comparing them with abstracts originally written in English and published in international journals in the area of medical sciences. To do this, 64 medical article abstracts (32 in Iranian journals, 32 in international journals) were analyzed and compared on the basis of Swales’ mo...

Persuasive negotiation occurs when autonomous agents exchange proposals that are backed up by rhetorical arguments (such as threats, rewards, or appeals). The role of such rhetorical arguments is to persuade the negotiation opponent to accept proposals more readily. To this end, this paper presents a rhetorical model of persuasion that defines the main types of rhetorical particles that are use...

Coherent texts are not just simple sequences of clauses and sentences, but rather complex artifacts that have highly elaborate rhetorical structure. This paper explores the extent to which well-formed rhetorical structures can be automatically derived by means of surface-form-based algorithms. These algorithms identify discourse usages of cue phrases and break sentences into clauses, hypothesiz...

To the Editor: Le Manach et al. present a study demonstrating the experimental applicability of changes in pulse pressure variation (dPPV) for the prediction of changes in cardiac output (dCO). The study is accompanied by a panegyric editorial answering the rhetorical question whether we need to monitor CO during surgery with a resounding NO! We now have dPPV!1,2 There is, however, a number of ...

This paper analyzes the influence of common ground (Clark 1996, Stalnaker 2002) on the variable use of Whinterrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese, in which four different structures are employed with semanticpragmatic equivalence: (1) Onde você mora? (Where you live?); (2) Onde que você mora? (Where that you live?); (3) Onde é que você mora? (Where is-it that you live?); and (4) Você mora onde? (...

Discourse connectives can show sense ambiguities, in that they can signal more than one possible rhetorical relation. The aim of this study is discover how to disambiguate such discourse connectives using a statistical model. Six discourse connectives (after, as soon as, before, once, since and while) which show ambiguities in the sdrt (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascari...

The aim of this research is to study effects of global and local structure of texts and of rhetorical relations between sentences on the prosodic realization of sentences in read aloud text. Twenty texts were analysed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text se...

Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have ...

This tiiesis addresses a difficult problem in text processing: crealing a System lo automalically dérive rhetorical structures o f text. Allhough thè rhelorical structure lias proven to be useful in many fields o f text processing sucli as text summarisation and information extraction, Systems that auiomalically generate rhetorical structures with high accuracy are difficult to find. This is bc...