Discourse markers improve both the quality and comprehension of a written text. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit and implicit instruction of formal meta-discourse markers on writ- ing skills. The quantitative data were collected from 90 upper-intermediate students at Shiraz Univer- sity Language Center. Two experimental groups went through an instruction, while the contr...

The NWO-programme Modelling textual organisation: coherence and cohesion studies the organisation of text into structural units by means of coherence (discourse relations between clausal and larger textual units) and cohesion (lexico-semantic relations between words in textual units). The programme is organised around two related PhD-projects, focussing on coherence and cohesion, respectively. ...

In this paper we propose a new cause-effect non-symmetric measure applied to the task of Recognizing Textual Entailment .First we searched over a big corpus for sentences which contains the discourse marker “because” and collected cause-effect pairs. The entailment recognition is based on measure the cause-effect relation between the text and the hypothesis using the relative frequencies of wor...

In an article published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (2000: 164), Fairclough stresses the importance of working ‘in a transdisciplinary way’ by combining language and social theory. He also makes the claim that social theorists fail to show how language operates in social life within social research – possibly because social theorists tend to pay too little attention to the role played by...

Despite showing an overtly simple structure, the semantic process in classic literary-narrative discourse conforms to complicated semiotic systems. As a result, semio-semantics is deemed as one of the most scientific, reliable tools since it helps intradiscursive semio-textual propositions be phenomenologically, and even epistemologically, analyzed. Consequently, the narrative discourse in “The...

This study was framed on the theory of Language Socialisation and a Systematic Functional Linguistic (SFL) approach. The aim of the study was to analyse the oral presentation discourse produced by an elemen- tary Iranian English as Second Language (ESL) postgraduate student in an American university four times (September/December, 2015 and March/September, 2016) over one year. The data were col...