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...

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...

Today, international communication has got a great significance for people around the world. Societies are more concerned with the positive and beneficial relations with other nations. It seems that the need for interrelationship with other communities is moving the world towards globalization. In such a world, 'advertising' is looked upon as a handy instrument to call for others' attention. In...

My thesis pursues the development of a tool to empower designers and non-designers to better understand humor's function in design and to encourage the use of humor as a rhetorical device to undertake social problems. Humor research is a field that is largely based on linguistic studies, but because of its multidisciplinary stretch in the past decade has displayed a broad rhetorical influence; ...

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 ...

Communicative competence is one of the most highly sought after skills of prospective graduates among employers. In spite of its importance, the notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in Communication and Engineering studies. This fuzziness has undoubtedly led to tensions among stakeholders like educators and professional engineers across disciplinary tenures in interpreting t...

          Advertising will use a rich range of expression techniques at all levels language. Not so rarely, tropes are used in advertising. Types the most common types tropes: allegory, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, metonymy, comparison, epithet. The phraseological expressions no less expressive. Journalists often phraseology as not only language but a...

Linguistic annotation is the process of adding additional notations to raw linguistic data for descriptive or analytical purposes. In the tagging of complex Chinese and multilingual linguistic data with a sophisticated linguistic framework, immediate visualization of the complex multi-layered functional and discourse structures is crucial for both speeding up the tagging process and reducing er...