The Hierarchical Organization of Text as Conceptualized by Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Systemic Functional Perspective

Abstract

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is an approach to the study of text organization which conceptualizes in relational terms a domain within the semantic stratum. In this paper, within an RST conceptualization of text organization, I propose that there are rhetorical subgroupings (or bands) between the local level of text organization, which is grammaticalized by clause complexing, and the upper most level of text organization, which potentially coincides with generic structure. Based on a quantitative analysis, I present a way of viewing text organization in terms of these rhetorical subgroupings within a text that is determined by clause complex boundary and text span size. The corpus used in this study comprises six undergraduate essays that were analysed using RST. In my corpus, other than rhetorical relations that occur within clause complexes and those that occur at the macro level of organization, there are three levels of rhetorical subgroupings of text spans, with identifiable subsets of rhetorical relations. These subgroupings provide a way of conceptualizing mid-level organization within a text, that is the rhetorical ‘chunking’ of different text span sizes within a large text.