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4 - Rhetorical structure analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2011

Barbara A. Fox
Barbara A. Fox
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Summary

The structure of expository prose has captured the interest of a wide range of disciplines, including rhetoric (Dillon 1981; Young et al. 1970; D'Angelo 1975; Winterowd 1975), cognitive psychology (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Meyer and Rice 1982; De Beaugrande 1980; Bransford 1979; Sanford and Garrod 1981; Britton and Black 1985), artificial intelligence (Alvarado 1986; Schank 1982; Brown 1985; McKeown 1982) and linguistics (Hinds 1979; Grimes 1975; Kamp 1981). While several of these studies have designed detailed and insightful notations for representing the hierarchical structure of expository prose (for example, the macrostructures of van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; the argument units of Alvarado 1986; the rhetorical schemas of McKeown 1982; the conceptual graph structures of Graesser and Goodman 1985; the structures of Meyer 1985), none of them provides all that is needed for an in-depth exploration of anaphora. For this study it was necessary to have a notation with the following characteristics:

Ability to represent a fairly complete range of argumentation relations. A model was needed that would provide relations like evidence, background, summary, justification.

Flexibility of combination. Given the range of texts examined (obituaries, biography, announcements, feature articles), it was important that the basic units be combinable in a relatively free way, rather than tightly constrained, as in a grammar.

Ability to represent texturing. It is now widely recognized that not all parts of a text hold the same communicative importance – some information is presented as central to the goals of the text and some as peripheral (Hopper and Thompson 1980; Grimes 1975). […]

Type
Chapter
Information
Discourse Structure and Anaphora
Written and Conversational English
 , pp. 77 - 92
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1987

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