Recent theories of metrical structure in Optimality Theory differ starkly in whether feet can be aligned gradiently (McCarthy and Prince 1993, Gordon 2002, Hyde 2002) or only categorically (Kager 2001, 2005, McCarthy 2003, Buckley 2009). Particularly challenging for certain categorical theories are apparent cases of the initial-dactyl effect, where all feet align rightward except for the leftmo...

Student veteran’s (SV) transition into academic life is challenging, and faculty/staff are uniquely positioned to support this change. Research calls for training SVs’ aid in their retention success. Framed by Rhetorical Relational Goal Theory (RRGT; Mottet et al., 2006), qualitative data identified instructional communication needs produced a program. Twenty-three SVs were interviewed about ne...

In this paper, we offer a novel method for processing given information in discourse, paying particular attention to definite descriptions. We argue that extant theories don’t do justice to the complexity of interaction between the knowledge resources that are used. In line with Hobbs (1979), we claim that discourse structure—as defined by the rhetorical connections between the propositions int...

contrastive rhetorical analysis as a way of understanding different ways through which writers from various cultural backgrounds shape their discourse was officially initiated by the works of kaplan (1966). this study tries to use the methodology to investigate the news reports in two american and iranian widely published newspapers. using the analytical methodologies of contrastive rhetoric an...

While quite a few linguistic corpora with syntactic annotations are available today, resources are scarce on the level of discourse annotation. A flexible, extendible annotation format speeds up development. We therefore propose an XML format for annotating rhetorical structure trees. In human and automatic analysis, rhetorical structure is often difficult and assigned incrementally. Thus, the ...

Introduction Most current formal theories of discourse incorporate some insight concerning the contribution of aspect to discourse structure, and many draw upon Hans Kamp’s analysis of the aspectual contribution of tenses, as well as Vlach’s notion of tenses as aspect-shift operators (cf. Vlach 1981). Thus, Kamp & Rohrer (1983) argue that the French imparfait acts as a ‘stativizer’, mapping non...

The notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in communication studies. This fuzziness has led to tensions among engineers across tenures in interpreting what constitutes communicative competence. The study seeks to investigate novice and professional engineers’ understanding of the said notion in terms of two main elements of communicative competence: linguistic and rhetorical c...

Much has been written on the nature and use of so-called rhetorical relations to govern the structure anti coherence of discourse, and much has been written on the need for communicative intentions to govern discourse construction. In early research on automated text creation, the operationalized structural relations from Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) [Mann & Thompson 88] were used both to ...