this study was set to reveal how second language learners use rhetorical relations in their written narratives in terms of rhetorical structure theory (rst) primarily proposed by mann & thompson (1987) and developed by mann, matthiessen & thompson (1992). to this end, sixty written narratives based on the picture story book ‘frog, where are you?’ were collected from efl learners and wer...

This comparative study aimed at finding out the types of grammatical shifts which have occurred in two English translations of the Quranic rhetorical questions, and the impact of such shifts on the said rhetorical questions. For these purposes, the study firstly analyzed the Arabic and English texts syntactically using the x-bar theory for Haegeman (2006) and then classified the grammatical shi...

In a previous production study [1] we explored the prosodic marking of thematic material in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts in German. While both conditions resulted in a prenuclear rise, we found that themes in contrastive context exhibited a significantly longer stressed vowel, together with a higher and later peak. Interestingly, speakers varied as to whether they used peak alignmen...

In this study we show that constituency is of limited importance for a proper treatment of the interaction between the linear position of a wa-marked nominal in a Japanese sentence and possible domains of contrastive focus, and that constraints concerning contrastive focus should be represented in terms of linear order and not constituency. Linearisation HPSG, where linear order is independent ...

In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. Metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one...

In this paper, we present a prototype that helps visualizing the relative importance of sentences extracted from medical texts using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). We propose to map rhetorical structures automatically recognized in the documents onto a set of communicative acts controlling the expression of an ECA. As a consequence, the ECA will dramatize a sentence to reflect its percei...

Pseudo-likelihood and contrastive divergence are two well-known examples of contrastive methods. These algorithms trade off the probability of the correct label with the probabilities of other “nearby” instantiations. In this paper we explore more general types of contrastive objectives, which trade off the probability of the correct label against an arbitrary set of other instantiations. We pr...