We argue that in order to detect stance, not only the explicit attitudes of the stance holder towards the targets are crucial. It is the whole narrative the writer drafts that counts, including the way he hypostasizes the discourse referents: as benefactors or villains, as victims or beneficiaries. We exemplify the ability of our system to identify targets and detect the writer’s stance towards...

For successful written communication, the writer not only must engage the readers’ attention but also must sustain their interest till the end whatever the length of the communication. The subject of the communication, the information or the propositional content alone, cannot hold the reader’s attention for long. A writer’s success depends not only on what is being conveyed but also on how wel...

SThis paper will analyse an introduction to a research article using three approaches to discourseanalysis: Swales’ (1990) Genre Analysis, Hoey’s (1991) bonding theory and Mann and Thompson’s(1986) rhetorical structure theory. Swales looks for writer strategies; Hoey focuses on collocation,while Mann and Thompson look for relations among propositions. However, all three produce<...

This research is part of the theoretical framework discourse analysis and was designed within an enunciative approach. It represents a cross-domain linguistics information science. focuses on media communication, particularly question positioning journalistic discourse. Indeed, this work proposes to study subjectivity in issue entitled: « Boycott, les raisons d’un ras-le-bol », published May 4t...

this paper, largely motivated by hoey (2001), revisits the issue of written discourse analysis and, in particular, the problem-solution pattern. much discussion embarrasses the way in which texts are pro-duced and understood. the different functional approaches include halliday and hasan’s approach, van dijk’s process-oriented approach, the procedural approach of de beaugrande and dressler, and...

Both in written and in spoken language, discourse relations may or may not be signalled by lexical material. In this paper we present the results of two experiments which were intended to answer some questions concerning the relationship between discourse relations and their lexical markers. Assuming that, in any case, discourse relations are inferred by the addressee/interpreter, the question ...

Sequence Models and Ranking Methods for Discourse Parsing A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ben Wellner Many important aspects of natural language reside beyond the level of a single sentence or clause, at the level of the discourse, including: reference relations such anaphora, notions of topic/...

The terrorism of obscurantism is one of the hallmarks of Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982), distinguishing it as one of the "difficult writings" in his canon. Terrorism, however, is not confined to the novel’s poetics of writing, it constitutes, as the arch-motif of the novel, its politics as well. Relying on the Orientalist bulk of knowledge about the Orient, DeLillo, in this novel, inaugurates a...

The goal of this study was to investigate the kinds of discourse goals that Iranian EFL learners perceive as the most probable reasons behind the utterance of figurative language, metaphors and similes, with reference to 4 independent variables of Figure Type (Metaphor or Simile), Tenor Concreteness (Concrete or Abstract), Context (List Format or Story), and Modality (Oral, Written, and Both). ...