This study aimed at investigating the impact of writing on Iranian EFL college students’ rhetorical organization. Thirty Iranian female undergraduate students majoring in English at Al-zahra University participated in the current study. The writing instructions included two stages, each lasting for four weeks. The participants were assigned to a control group and an experimental group according...

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...

This paper introduces the first Basque discourse TreeBank annotated with rhetorical relations following Rhetorical Structure Theory. We report the main features of the corpus, such as the annotation criteria, inter-annotator agreement and harmonization procedure. We describe an online search system to check the annotation of discourse relations.

In this paper we report on several issues arising out of a first attempt to annotate task-oriented spoken dialog for rhetorical structure using Rhetorical Structure Theory. We discuss an annotation scheme we are developing to resolve the difficulties we have encountered.

We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.

Rhetorical moves are a useful framework for analyzing the hidden rhetorical organization in research papers, in teaching academic writing. We propose a ∗ 國立清華大學資工系 NTHU NLPLAB Email: {cheng, hsiang, joe}@nlplab.cc; [email protected]; [email protected]

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this paper, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reli...

News of the insolvency Overend, Gurney, & Company on 10 May 1866 generated a scramble for funds in City London and urgent appeals to Bank England. The banking panic triggered by collapse prominent British discount house became one Bank's most tumultuous modern crises. This article investigates politics liquidity provision during crisis, ensuing months financial stringency. By assessing correspo...