Coherent texts are not just simple sequences of clauses and sentences, but rather complex artifacts that have highly elaborate rhetorical structure. This paper explores the extent to which well-formed rhetorical structures can be automatically derived by means of surface-form-based algorithms. These algorithms identify discourse usages of cue phrases and break sentences into clauses, hypothesiz...

The goal of this paper is to challenge some of tile assumptions that have been inherent in much of the research on discourse relations, especially that which has gone on in the context of text planning. The primary assumption has been that there is only one set of relations, encompassing structural, rhetorical, and intentional information. The second assumption is that these relations only oper...

This paper examines the hypothesis that all public policies are based, at least in part, on rhetorical strategies. By analysing public policies implemented in the context of sustainable development, this article emphasises the need for and the challenges of providing legitimate foundations for the rhetorical means used to encourage change; it is these foundations that determine a given policy’s...

This comparative study aimed at finding out the types of grammatical shifts which have occurred in two English translations of the Quranic rhetorical questions, and the impact of such shifts on the said rhetorical questions. For these purposes, the study firstly analyzed the Arabic and English texts syntactically using the x-bar theory for Haegeman (2006) and then classified the grammatical shi...

A question may be asked not only to elicit information, but also to make a statement. Questions serving the latter purpose, called rhetorical questions, are often lexically and syntactically indistinguishable from other types of questions. Still, it is desirable to be able to identify rhetorical questions, as it is relevant for many NLP tasks, including information extraction and text summariza...

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 ...

Recent studies in academic discourse show that rhetorical choices in student academic writing differ across disciplines. Focusing on the introductions of examination essays, the present study examines the rhetorical choices made by second-year undergraduates in Literature-in-English and Sociology courses in a Ghanaian state university. A combined framework comprising Swales‟ rhetorical move app...

Explaining why the same passage may have different rhetorical structures when conveyed in different languages remains an open question. Starting from a trilingual translation corpus, this paper aims to provide a new qualitative method for the comparison of rhetorical structures in different languages and to specify why translated texts may differ in their rhetorical structures. To achieve these...

Abstract Thematic development refers to the way theme and rheme in the clause are developed. The theory of rhetorical structure can be defined as the strategies that follow specific ways to make writing more persuasive. The present study aimed to examine how Iraqi writers maintain cohesion in the text by analyzing the patterns of thematic progression in various rhetorical sections in an online ...