Despite their ambiguous historical record, conservation/development interventions the world over have remained a popular environmental governance tool. One of the latest global ‘trends’ are interventions to establish so-called ‘Transfrontier Conservation Areas’ (TFCAs): large contiguous spaces that are principally aimed at conserving biological diversity across national boundaries. In line with...

BACKGROUND Adequate use of different learning strategies is one of the most important prerequisites of academic success. The actual use of learning strategies is the result of an interaction between individual and situational variables. Against this background we conducted a longitudinal study with first year medical students to investigate whether individuals show different patterns in their u...

Recent research has revealed that learning behavior is associated with academic achievement at the college level, but the impact of specific learning strategies on academic success as well as gender differences therein are still not clear. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate gender differences in the incremental contribution of learning strategies over general cognitive ability ...

We examine how nonveridical markers and rhetorical relations contribute to the expression of Appraisal (evaluation) in discourse. First, we define nonveridicality and nonveridical contexts, following Giannakidou (Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)Veridical Dependency. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998). We then relate nonveridicality to modality, Appraisal and rhetorical relations, and present a map o...

Rhetorical figures appear frequently in the headlines of magazine ads. This paper examines the effect of repetition on ads containing two types of rhetorical figures: easyto-understand rhymes and challenging puns. The findings indicate that high levels of repetition may not be necessary when ad headlines contain such rhetorical figures, even under conditions where subjects are not directed to p...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

This article offers a rhetorical design perspective on persuasive technology design, introducing Bitzer’s method of the rhetorical situation. As a case study, knowledge workers in an industrial engineering corporation are examined using Bitzer’s method. Introducing a new system, knowledge workers are to be given the task of innovating and maintaining business processes, thus contributing with c...

In this article, we present the on-line interface that we have developed for the RST Spanish Treebank, the first corpus including Spanish texts annotated with rhetorical relations. This interface allows users to consult or download the texts and their corresponding annotations. In addition, it allows carrying out several tasks over a selected subcorpus: searching statistics in terms of words, r...