In many applications in computational linguistics, such as machine translation, we want to understand why a writer has used language in a particular way, what specific effects she intended to convey, and which linguistic choices were made to achieve those goals. This idea, that a writer has specific communicative goals or intentions in mind when she composes text, goes back to the study of clas...

The present paper focused on the sociocultural explanations of rhetorical differences between English and Persian and was based on the contrastive genre analysis of Applied Linguistics research article abstracts in these two languages. The evolutionary nature of research article abstracts was also investigated from 1985 to 2005, in three stages, with a time interval of 10 years. Seventy eight r...

In this paper we investigate the rational foundations of pragmatic reasoning. For specificity, we’ll use a particular theory of discourse interpretation that combines an account of rhetorical structure with dynamic semantics. In particular we argue for a rich, linguistic notion of discourse context which we compute by means of simple defeasible rules in a nonmonotonic propositional logic. These...

In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interesting poetry of the first half of the 20 century. These figures are at first traced back to some famous poet of the past and then compared to classical Latin prose. Linguistic theory is then called in to show how they can be represented in syntactic structures and classified as noncanonical structures, ...

shahanshāhnāma is one of the historical epic poems composed by ahmad tabrizi at the end of the ilkhanids’ reign. at the time, the poet was not able to openly criticize the mongols. at times, one may even think that he is praising them. on the contrary, in the hidden layers of his composition, the poet tries to show his criticism by using rhetorical and linguistic tools and praising iran and ira...

Explaining why the same passage may have different rhetorical structures when conveyed in different languages remains an open question. Starting from a trilingual translation corpus, this paper aims to provide a new qualitative method for the comparison of rhetorical structures in different languages and to specify why translated texts may differ in their rhetorical structures. To achieve these...

The oral case presentation is an important communicative activity in the teaching and assessment of students. Despite its importance, not much attention has been paid to providing support for teachers to teach this difficult task to medical students who are novices to this form of communication. As a formalized piece of talk that takes a regularized form and used for a specific communicative go...

Similes are figures of speech in which the similarities as well as the differences between two or more semantically unrelated entities are expressed by means of a linguistic unit. This unit, also called marker, can either be a morpheme, a word or a phrase. Since similes rely on comparison, they occur in several languages of the world. Depending on the marker used and of the semantic or structur...