Title of Dissertation: SIMPLE REGRETS: COUNTERFACTUALS AND THE DIALOGIC MIND Jennifer Riddle Harding, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Mark Turner Department of English Counterfactuals, or unrealized scenarios, have been a focus of research in an array of disciplines, though their rhetorical implications have gone largely unexplored. This interdisciplinary study us...

this study tries to review the reasons for which young girls tend to perform beauty surgeries on their faces, within the framework of veblen’s “theory of the leisure class” and his “social models” such as fiscal ownership. the statistical society has been the girl students of the university of tehran selected through snow ball sampling and discourse analysis was applied to analyze the semi-stru...

Most of the literary theorists and critics of classical antiquity who are still studied today – Plato, Aristotle, ‘Longinus’, and a few others – are Greeks. The Romans, who by reputation came late to literature and lacked a theoretical cast of mind, are not generally accorded a prominent place in the development of this discourse. Indeed, few surviving Roman texts address as their main topic th...

The present study considers the issue of verbal violence in the language of drama. In the evaluation of verbal violence, Jeanette Malkin (2004) proposes six maxims, through which language may be considered as an arrogant element. The characters in dramatic texts (as in other literary texts) are created, developed, evolved and - in some cases - destroyed by language. In a considerable numb...

A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant interjections and of back-channel utterances. These expressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless, spurious expressions. On the basis of the analysis of spoken dialogue corpus, we claim that these utterances...

RASTA (Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer), a discourse analysis component within the Microsoft English Grammar, efficiently computes representations of the structure of written discourse using information available in syntactic and logical form analyses. RASTA heuristically scores the rhetorical relations that it hypothesizes, using those scores to guide it in producing more plausible discou...

the present study considers the issue of verbal violence in the language of drama. in the evaluation of verbal violence, jeanette malkin (2004) proposes six maxims, through which language may be considered as an arrogant element. the characters in dramatic texts (as in other literary texts) are created, developed, evolved and - in some cases - destroyed by language. in a considerable number of ...

Many existing approaches for measuring text complexity tend to overestimate the complexity levels of informational texts while simultaneously underestimating the complexity levels of literary texts. We present a two-stage estimation technique that successfully addresses this problem. At Stage 1, each text is classified into one or another of three possible genres: informational, literary or mix...