On Structure And Intention

On the text surface the transition from one communicative goal to another can, for instance , be observed from the text layout. Where a new goal sets in, the p;i.ragral)h structure is often interrupted and a new paragraph begins. Also, the theme of the first sentence of such a new paragraph is in inost ca.ses not related to any element in the previous sentence, which is the case when subsequent sentences belong to the same communicative goal. Instead, a new lexeme expressing the new global :[bcus is usually preferred. The following text fragment exemplilies some of the l)henomena identified above. (..) As earlier, more than half of imported soft drinks came fi'om Austria, |ollowed by West Germany and Belgium/Luxembourg. Also e~.ports of mineral water contimted to expand rapidly. The two sentences given in Example 3 include a transition between two text segments which follow two different communicative goals. As an effect, the paragraph topic changes from import to ezport, the new i)aragral)h introduces the new topic by placing it at thematic position and a new (surface) paragraph is created. From what has been said above it can be concluded tha.t linguistic surface signals as discussed above are ways to realize virtual constructs like rhetorical relations and communicative goals. This means that the interaction between communicative goals and rhetorical relations is one of realization. Rhetorical relations are employed to achieve communicative goals. There are possibly other ways of interaction between goals and relations, but they a.re difficult to observe and of rather speculative nature. Therefore, we restricted the description of the interaction between goals and relations to what is observable. As pointed out in [Maier and Hovy, '91] three types of relations can be distinguished: ideational, interpersonal and textual relations. Descriptive texts can be characterized by the preferred use of ideational relations while interpersonal relations occur in genres with a high degree of reader involvement (advertisements, personal letters, etc.). Textual relations are unspecific with respect to text types although sul)sets of the textual relations might be preferal)ly used for some genres ([Maier '93]). Various types of communicative goals are responsible for the use of either ideational or interpersonal relations-in [Maier and Hovy, '91] called "ideational" and "interpersonal" goals, respectively. This labeling does not refer to the nature of the comnmnicative goals; it rather refers to the type of text to be generated and the type of relations to be used. Instead, …