Cross-national, or cross-cultural, studies of academic writing have moved beyond contrastive rhetoric’s textual focus to broad concerns of students’ firstand second-language literacy development. However, we remain in the dark as to how, in a micro view, students initiate into academic discourses in cross-national contexts. Situating our study in first-year writing courses in a Taiwanese and a ...

This paper presents DiZer, an automatic DIscourse analyZER for Brazilian Portuguese. Given a source text, the system automatically produces its corresponding rhetorical analysis, following Rhetorical Structure Theory – RST (Mann and Thompson, 1987). A rhetorical repository, which is DiZer main component, makes the automatic analysis possible. This repository, produced by means of a corpus analy...

Rhetorical structure analysis (RSA) explores discourse relations among elementary discourse units (EDUs) in a text. It is very useful in many text processing tasks employing relationships among EDUs such as text understanding, summarization, and question-answering. Thai language with its distinctive linguistic characteristics requires a unique technique. This article proposes an approach for Th...

In meetings where important decisions get made, what items receive more attention may influence the outcome. We examine how different types of rhetorical (de-)emphasis — including hedges, superlatives, and contrastive conjunctions — correlate with what gets revisited later, controlling for item frequency and speaker. Our data consists of transcripts of recurring meetings of the Federal Reserve’...

Abstract Using rhetorical figures in specialized languages like the language of newspaper headlines is common. The present study attempted to conduct a contrastive analysis of the English and Persian sport newspaper headlines related to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Toward this end, a corpus consisting of 400 English and 400 Persian headlines published during 12th of June to 13th of July, 2014 was c...

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 ...

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 ...

This paper focuses on areas of overlap between linguistic and rhetorical analyses of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. The question is raised whether and to what extent conclusions drawn from a text immanent linguistic approach, on the one hand, and those drawn from rhetorical analyses, on the other, are compatible and mutually supportive. Using Galatians as sample text, the author compares three...

The paper presents RetFig, a formal domain ontology of rhetorical figures for Serbian. This ontology is one of the necessary steps in developing tools for Natural Language Processing in the Serbian language, especially for tools pertinent to discourse analysis, sentiment analysis and opinion mining. The RetFig ontology was developed taking into account a plethora of rhetorical figures in the mo...