We present a method of using cohesion to improve discourse element identification for sentences in student essays. New features for each sentence are derived by considering its relations to global and local cohesion, which are created by means of cohesive resources and subtopic coverage. In our experiments, we obtain significant improvements on identifying all discourse elements, especially of ...

Media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. The analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. Adopting van Dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the Iranian movie A Separation, the winner of the 84th An...

To compare discourse differences in American and English/Welsh legal cases, we conducted a discriminant function analysis along five indices of cohesion on a specially constructed corpus. Our results suggest substantial differences, casting doubt on previous generalizations about British and American writing. Our results also offer guidance to developers of legal English textbooks and drafters ...

This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences offers a collection of original contributions to the study of languages in contrast from discourse, corpus, and functional perspectives. The papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, held in Berlin 29 September–3 October 2010, in the context of two panels: ‘Discourse analysis and contrastive l...

We discuss and evaluate a new annotation scheme and discourse-analytic method, the QUD-tree framework. We present an annotation study, in which the framework, based on the concept of Questions under Discussion, is applied to English and German interview data, using TreeAnno, an annotation tool specially developed for this new kind of discourse annotation. The results of an inter-annotator agree...

in this study, van dijk’s (1998) model of cda was utilized in order to examine the representation of iran’s nuclear program in editorials published by british news casting companies. the analysis of the editorials was carried out at two levels of headlines and full text stories with regard to the linguistic features of lexical choices, nominalization, passivization, overcompleteness, and voice....

this study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in english and persian abstracts of iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. for this purpose, one hundred english and persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on seddigh and yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of halliday and hasan’s (1976) and halli...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed analysis of how lexical differences related to cohesion and connectionist models can distinguish first language (L1) writers of English from second language (L2) writers of English. Key to this analysis is the use of the computational tool Coh-Metrix, which measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conc...