Policy, including technology policy, is made of language. Politicians, bureaucrats, and consultants use language to shape action and ways of thinking by fabricating rules that enable individuals to deal with unresolvable contradictions of everyday life. The evolution of geospatial ICT policy can be best understood through the language of spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiatives and the ana...

Past research is not clear on the process by which rhetorical questions influence persuasion (i.e., increased focus on message arguments vs. on the persuasion agent). Based on recent theories of persuasion knowledge and rhetorical figures in advertising, our model delineates conditions under which rhetoricals are likely to enhance argument elaboration (low salience of the rhetorical) and those ...

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze role cohesion rhetorical structure undergraduate EFL students. Hence, 13 three-stage argument were analyzed on preset framework analysis. Discourse analysis...

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...

The paper discusses the development of rhetorical analyses of political addresses from classical antiquity to modern political communication. A specific genre, the ‘epideictic address’, is described in detail. It concerns addresses by representative persons. Most epideictic addresses turn out to be ‘hybrid’ texts because they combine an orientation towards (rhetorical-political) persuasion with...

Linguistic annotation provides additional information asserted with a particular purpose in a document or other piece of information. It is widely used in various fields, from computing and bioinformatics, through imaging, to law and linguistics. There is also a clear distinction between what is communicated through the written/spoken natural language and how this is passed on. We are studying ...

Genre analysis has received much attention in the last decades. For both academic and pedagogical purposes, different genres have been analysed terms of their rhetorical features. In English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tradition, genre focuses on communicative functions described moves steps, linguistic properties these functions. such an having structural aspects, researchers typically use mod...

Taking an interdisciplinary and bimodal approach to genre analysis, this paper examines the influence of an IT system on a genre of technical communication: the technical trouble ticket. This genre is examined first as an organizational practice, and then as a set of rhetorical statements; finally, the two approaches are combined and the role of the system in creating, controlling and enabling ...