Discourse Organization Research Articles

ERST: A Signaled Graph Theory of Discourse Relations and Organization

Abstract In this article we present Enhanced Rhetorical Structure Theory (eRST), a new theoretical framework for computational discourse analysis, based on an expansion of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The framework encompasses discourse relation graphs with tree-breaking, non-projective and concurrent relations, as well as implicit and explicit signals which give explainable rationales to our analyses. We survey shortcomings of RST and other existing frameworks, such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the Penn Discourse Treebank, and Discourse Dependencies, and address these using constructs in the proposed theory. We provide annotation, search, and visualization tools for data, and present and evaluate a freely available corpus of English annotated according to our framework, encompassing 12 spoken and written genres with over 200K tokens. Finally, we discuss automatic parsing, evaluation metrics, and applications for data in our framework.

Unraveling University EFL Teachers’ Feedback Beliefs in Teaching English Argumentative Writing

ABSTRACTTeachers’ beliefs about feedback can affect both the way they provide feedback and its effectiveness in improving students’ writing proficiency. However, research remains scant on belief–practice relationships. This study attempted to fill the gap by investigating such relationships with a sample of 112 Chinese university EFL teachers in teaching argumentative writing. Data were collected through a writing feedback beliefs and practices questionnaire, an argumentative writing teaching beliefs questionnaire, and semi‐structured interviews. The participants were selected using convenience sampling from six universities in Northern China. Quantitative data were analyzed through confirmatory factor analysis, multiple regression, and repeated measures ANOVA to examine the characteristics of these teachers’ writing feedback beliefs and the relationships between the beliefs and relevant practices. Qualitative data from the interviews were analyzed thematically to gain deeper insights into the belief–practice relationships. Results indicated that most teachers believed their feedback was crucial for improving students' argumentative writing, particularly regarding communicative purposes, discourse organization, linguistic expressions, argument construction, and rhetorical techniques. However, a discrepancy was noted between teachers' feedback beliefs and their practices, especially concerning linguistic expressions. These findings highlight the need for targeted support to better align teachers' feedback beliefs with their practices for more effective teaching of EFL writing.

Writing performance and discourse organization in L2 Chinese: A longitudinal case study

The present study explored the development of writing performance and discourse organization in Chinese as a second language (L2) writing, focusing on the effects of genre and learning context. Tracking an L2 Chinese learner’s written production in two genres (i.e., narrative and argumentative) across four learning contexts (i.e., pre-study abroad, study abroad, post-study abroad, and delayed post-study abroad) longitudinally over four years, this study revealed that holistic ratings and discourse organizational devices showed distinct patterns in different genres and across learning contexts. Narrative essays generally received lower ratings than argumentative essays. Ratings of narrative essays remained relatively stable across four learning contexts, whereas those of argumentative essays displayed an omega-shaped pattern over the four-year period. Among six discourse organizational devices, subordinate clauses, textual connectives, and grammatical metaphors were used more in argumentative essays, but coordinate clauses and topic-prominent constructions were used more in narrative essays. The six discourse organizational devices exhibited discrete developmental trends throughout the four years of learning. This study provides a deeper understanding of writing performance and discourse organization in L2 Chinese development.

Intonation cues to English public discourse perception

The study considers the discourse functions of intonation and identifies a few problems and contradictions in the current theories of intonation functioning. Particular attention is paid to such issues as the multiple functions of nuclear tones, pitch declination in utterances and perceptual identification of spoken paragraphs. An attempt has been made to handle these problems in the context of English public speeches delivered in the format of TED talks. The purpose of the auditory analysis of discourse intonation in these talks is to check the perceptual reliability of intonation cues in processing spoken discourse and the possibility of using intonation as an on-line perception strategy. The methods applied in the research are descriptive, auditory and comparative, supported by a certain amount of quantitative data. The results obtained in the auditory analysis show that intonation cues work most effectively at the level of intonation groups and utterances but are not self-sufficient in paragraph identification. The leading function of nuclear tones in public discourse organization turns out to be the information structuring of utterances, which is occasionally interrupted by the attitudinal function. Pitch declination has been found to be one of the most important cues to the integrity and cohesion of utterances, with an average length of three-four intonation groups. Multiple declinations in spoken utterances are infrequent and are triggered by particular types of syntactic relations in elongated sentences. The study contributes to the linguistic description of discourse intonation, and its results can be beneficial for language teaching practice and automated speech synthesis.

Human rights in education implication schema based on the study of the UN Economic and Social Council’s 2030 agenda

Human rights in education are an essential area that needs to be the highest priority for improving almost the entire world, especially for the 2030 agenda. This research analyzed the human rights in education values inside the UN Economic and Social Council’s declaration goal 4 of the official document entitled “Building back better from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) while advancing the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. The data are analyzed through a critical discourse approach in qualitative design and discourse organization analysis method. There are nine main human rights in education found inside the declaration including ensuring and protecting education equality, education, and learning development acceleration, preparing and providing sufficient education funding, cultural diversity in education, providing a safe environment for physical and mental health, providing safe, modern and convenient infrastructure and teaching-learning facilities, gender equality in education, internet literacy in education, involving every country as to the world’s global meeting and cooperation of education. The focus of improvement on human rights in education is concluded to be dynamic, which is influenced by economic, welfare, politics, IT, and other integral aspects of development and depends on the world’s and a country’s needs and future desire.

The Theme Progression Patterns in Popular Science Book Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Approach

Despite the proliferation of digital mediums such as documentary series, video essays, and science podcasts, popular science books are still the primary medium for promoting science to the public as an epistemic way to understanding and being aware of our natural world. That said, in the domain of systemic functional linguistics, there exists a dearth of studies investigating popular science books. Hence, this study aims to investigate the organization of popular science discourse from the perspective of Theme Progression. A 93,078-word corpus was collected and divided into two main science categories: hard and soft—three disciplines under each main category and six texts under each discipline. The analysis of the corpus followed a mixed-method design where a Theme-counting excel sheet, created by the researcher, was used to calculate the most occurring Theme patterns. The results of the analysis indicate that the hard science disciplines give a logical presentation of the scientific text that intends to unpack and explain the intricacy behind the scientific notion whereas the soft science disciplines focus on expository narrative to connect and relate the scientific text to the target reader. Given these writing behaviors between the two science categories, it is recommended that future SFL studies explore the potentially arising differences within the broader aspect of the popular science genre, for instance, to juxtapose books from articles in the way discoursal features (e.g., coherence and cohesion) are structured in the text.

"BATTLE OF NARRATIVES" AS A MARKER OF HYBRID WARFARE (CONTENT ANALYSIS OF THE INFORMATION SPACE OF THE KHARKIV REGION)

Since the Russian Federation’s full-scale incursion into our country, there has been a notable shift in the narrative landscape at the systemic, national and local levels. By analyzing the content of narratives, it may be possible to make predictions about what will happen in the real world. These could include things like the military situation, the possibility of shelling, and the topics and directions of communication at the international level. The aim of this article is to study the Ukrainian and pro-Russian narratives that have emerged in response to certain events of the hybrid war, with a view to gaining insights into how these narratives are shaping the information space of the Kharkiv region. The object of this study is to examine the battle of narratives as a potential marker of hybrid warfare. The subject is the cognitive confrontation between pro-Russian and Ukrainian narratives in the information space of the Kharkiv region. The study is based on the findings of a content analysis of the information space of the Kharkiv region carried out between January and March 2024, which involved the analysis of over 500,000 items. It is a significant contribution to the field of study that this is the first time the battle of narratives in a specific region of Ukraine has been analyzed in order to predict events (military and socio-political) in the real world. The study offers a theoretical contribution to the field by demonstrating the practical significance of scientific linguistic research in the context of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The practical significance of scientific research may be seen in the development of an algorithm for analyzing the battle of narratives" in order to predict events in reality. The research methodology involved a content analysis conducted on the basis of Big Data technology and a set of analytical algorithms from the Attack Index information and analytical service. This approach allowed us to determine the degree of information resonance or danger of information flows on selected topics/personalities. It has been proven that Russian propaganda tries to transport a number of destructive narratives from the Russian media space into the Ukrainian one: "The Russian Federation is occupying Kharkiv, repeated attacks on Kharkiv and Kyiv are possible"; "A large-scale mobilization will take place in Ukraine to replenish the “catastrophic” gates"; "Russia seized the initiative on all fronts" and others. Kharkiv media during the mentioned period won the battle of narratives, using the following strategies: ignoring Russian narratives aimed at causing citizens a sense of hopelessness and a desire to surrender the city to the enemy; promotion of positive regional therapeutic narratives "Kharkiv is my city", "Kharkiv will stand, it is necessary to unite to oppose the enemy" and national — "Shocking of Kharkiv and other cities of Ukraine is a war crime". It seems that further study of the systemic organization and use of narrative discourse in hybrid confrontation could prove beneficial.

Genre of “Promise” as a Reflection of Intentional and Linguistic Organization in Virtual Pedagogical Discourse

This research is situated within the context of contemporary discourse studies. It examines the genre of “promise” functioning within virtual pedagogical discourse. The study explores the genre features of a speech act, considering their potential determination by the pragmatic properties of discourse. Drawing on existing models of speech genres in contemporary genre theory (models by Т. V. Shmeleva, N. B. Lebedeva), two types of genre features of promises are identified. The first type includes invariant characteristics of the genre “promise”: a) the communicative goal of the utterance, linked to a voluntary commitment by the subject to fulfill something; b) linguistic markers of the genre — syntactic constructions containing performative “I promise,” predicates “I swear” / “commit” / “give (<my word>)” with direct objects or explanatory clauses indicating the object of the promise. The second group of features comprises genre characteristics of the text, determined by its discursive nature: a) the dictum content of the genre (theme of “Education”), b) the status roles of participants in institutional-pedagogical discourse; c) properties of the speech act determined by the structural-functional features of the messenger (interactivity, media files). Ultimately, a promise emerges as a genre realization of shared and simultaneously adapted speechthinking intention and discursive means.

Coherence and comprehensibility in second language speakers’ academic speaking performance

AbstractThis study examined the role of discourse organization in second language (L2) comprehensibility ratings. Twelve English for Academic Purposes teachers listened to 60 L2 speech samples elicited through a TOEFL–type integrated speaking task, evaluating each sample for comprehensibility and coherence (perceived interconnectedness of ideas). The samples were analyzed for the occurrence of discourse features at micro and macro levels. Results revealed a strong association between coherence and comprehensibility (r = .70). Whereas L2 speakers’ use of additive connectives (e.g., and) uniquely predicted comprehensibility, ordering of ideas and source–speech similarity in speakers’ performances predicted coherence. Lexical overlaps predicted both constructs. Findings underscore the importance of coherence to comprehensible academic L2 speech demonstrating that the two constructs include partially overlapping yet distinct characteristics.

Elizabeth Usher memorial lecture. Models, mind maps, and metacognition: How theory is the true hero

Within the educational context of identifying the critical ingredients of an effective speech-language pathologist, this paper highlights the centrality of theory in underpinning every level of our practice. A spotlight is placed on us knowing how language and communication work, what makes our interventions work, how we can make the most difference through our choices in therapy, and what makes both us and our clients respond. So, what are the critical ingredients of an effective speech-language pathologist, of an effective therapy, of an effective therapeutic alliance, and why is this so important? While there are many foundational and guiding habits upon which new graduates, early career, and experienced clinicians shape their practice, no one habit is regarded as more important than us exploring the theoretical underpinnings of what we are doing and why. To underscore the role of theory in our everyday practice, a discourse level intervention for people with aphasia is used as an exemplar to track the complex contribution of different theories to a single intervention. Discourse level interventions are relatively new on the scene in the area of acquired language disorders. Child language interventions, on the other hand, have frequently revolved around the story, aiming to bridge the oral-literate divide through the development of narrative structure. This paper will aim to weave its own story around discourse level interventions, combining the narrative genre with the everyday genres used by adults in conversation. I will highlight how this approach taps into lexical theories, sentence processing theories, discourse organisation, and the cognitive underpinnings of language, and closely examine how this multilayering of language in context may hold some of the answers to questions around generalisation, impact, and making the greatest difference to individuals.

Exploring High School English Teaching Strategies for Continuation Writing based on Discourse Cohesion Theory

As a new type of question under the background of the new college entrance examination, continuation writing requires the writer to continue the article based on the context provided in the previous text, supplemented by the situational context of the article, and ensuring the logical coherence of the content. Discourse cohesion theory focuses on the coherence of grammar and vocabulary in discourse organization, aiming to construct a complete and coherent discourse text. The cohesive means under this theory can help writers to produce a well-structured, logically clear, and coherent article to a certain extent. Starting from the concept and existing problems of continuation writing, this article analyzes and explores the points of convergence between discourse cohesion theory and continuation writing, and proposes several teaching strategies to better guide writing teaching and improve students' writing ability. From the perspective of discourse cohesion theory, teachers can guide students to select appropriate referencing methods, plan the overall layout, pay attention to smooth connections, maintain logical clarity, and skillfully use substitution and ellipsis to refine language, making the writing process more efficient.

Mediatization of the Ecological Security in the English Media: Corpus-Assisted Approach

Introduction. The relevance of the work is due to the interest of linguistics in the issues of discursive mediatization of socially significant phenomena in the English-language media, in particular environmental safety as the most important value of modern society. The scientific novelty of the study lies in establishing the content of the value “environmental safety” on the basis of systematization and quantification of semantic fields that are correlated with the main topics that determine the interpretation of this socially significant phenomenon in the British media and form a discourse-based thesaurus of its representation. Methodology and sources. The paper used corpus linguistics methods and the interpretative method of discourse analysis. The empirical basis of the study was a corpus of media texts of high-quality and popular media devoted to environmental safety issues, the corpus size was more than 200 thousand words. Results and discussion. Based on corpus analysis, semantic fields were identified that represent the concept under study in the high-quality and popular British press. It is shown that in the media narratives of the British media, ES is closely associated with climate change and global warming. It was revealed that the dominant topics in narratives about environmental security in both types of media are: 1) the environment; 2) science; 3) politics. A comparative analysis of the semantic fields showed the predominance of the semantic field “science” in high-quality media, which indicates rational and logical strategies for influencing a wide readership. In the texts of popular media, the semantic field “politics” dominates, which indicates the politicization of the discourse of environmental safety and indicates a strategy of emotional impact on the addressee. Both corpora emphasize the issues of climate change, related to unfavourable weather conditions and extremely high temperatures, however, high-quality press texts mention temperature anomalies much more often, which indicates an attempt to arouse public concern about the existing threat and encourage the adoption of necessary measures. Conclusion. The proposed methodology can be used in analyzing the specifics of other media discursive practices in terms of their discursive-textual organization, in studying the rhetorical, pragmatic and linguocultural organization of environmental safety discourse in sociocultural and ideological perspectives.

All eyes on the signal? - Mapping cohesive discourse structures with eye-tracking data of explanation videos

In this paper, we consider the issue of how the fine-grained multimodal design of educational explanation videos, such as those widely available on YouTube and other platforms, may be made accessible to empirical studies of reception and effectiveness. This is necessary because previous research has often led to conflicting conclusions concerning the roles of particular design elements. We argue that this may largely be due to insufficient characterizations of multimodal design itself. To achieve tighter control of this potential source of variation, we present a multimodal descriptive annotation framework drawing on multimodal (cohesive) film discourse analysis. This framework is seen as a critical first step toward being able to highlight just those differences in design that have functional consequences. For such consequences to accrue, however, viewers need to attend differently to corresponding design differences. The goal of the current paper, therefore, is to use eye-tracking techniques to explore the extent to which discourse structures revealed by our analytic framework relate to recipients' attention allocation. We hypothesize that any potentially emerging anomalies in regards to discourse organization, such as instances of unsuccessful cohesion signaling, may have correlations in the behavioral data. We report our current state of development for performing this kind of multimodal cohesion analysis and some of the unresolved challenges raised when considering how such analyses may be related to performance data.

Discourse patterning and recursion in the EU case law

Abstract This paper proposes a novel approach to analysing the text organization of legal texts, specifically focusing on discourse patterning and recursion in the context of EU case law. The study investigates the discourse organization of the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) by exploring, in a data-driven analysis, the use of multiword expressions that occur with specific colligation properties. One peculiarity of CJEU judgments is that their structure is not readily visible since headings are unsystematically used. The application of the present approach demonstrated that discourse organization can be revealed in terms of discourse patterns, signalling devices, and by exploring the position of linguistic expressions in the text. The findings not only reveal concealed text organization units in CJEU judgments but also offer a methodological model for similar analyses in other legal and non-legal texts. The proposed model suggests an investigation of the interaction between metadiscourse (IMD), discourse patterns (DPD), and textual colligation, positing that when IMD and DPD exhibit textual colligation, they signal discourse patterning. This proposal connects two levels of text organization through textual correlation. The study further explores relations between discourse patterns in terms of the notion of recursion.

On the transcreation, format and actionability of healthcare translations

In public-health crises, members of multilingual communities must be able to access, understand, trust and act upon behaviour-change messaging. The role of translators is therefore critical, not only for the relaying of information but also in the transcreation of texts, understood as adaptation to suit the characteristics of an intended audience. Failure to use transcreation may produce messaging that is culturally inappropriate and thus ineffective. This study analyses healthcare resources created by governments in Australia with a view to identifying formatting and other visual features that would benefit from transcreation. A mixed-method approach combined numerical evaluation of four documents using the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT) and a bottom-up thematic analysis of the way the same texts were discussed by 58 members of a broad range of ethnocultural and linguistic groups in Victoria, Australia. The findings point to a need to go beyond the linguistic aspects of the translation and take into account the discourse organisation, layout, images and cultural appropriateness of health messaging. The implications of applying the PEMAT criteria are not only that start texts will become more accessible and better able to facilitate understanding-based trust relations, but also that translators are well placed to participate in the transcreations that may be required in the various target languages.

Dynamics of American Political Discourse of the 20th – Early 21st Centuries

The article addresses dynamics of conceptual space and communicative organization of the American political discourse in the 20 th – early 21 st centuries. The research objective is to identify transformations in the content of universal and nationally-marked concepts, as well as verbal modification of communicative strategies and tactics in the American political discourse of the periods under study. The main research methods applied are discourse, conceptual, semantic, and contextual analysis. The sampling corpus incorporates 662 public speeches of American presidents. The speeches under analysis belong to the ritual, orientational, and agonal genres of the political discourse. The main discourse-forming and nationally-marked concepts, features of the communicative structure of the American political discourse are established. The analysis of the metaphorical system as a way of realizing the intention in the American political discourse is carried out. The main types of conceptual metaphor, representing the discourse-forming concepts of the American political discourse are considered. The American political discourse conceptual space is more prone to transformations than its communicative structure in the studied timeframe. The nationally-marked concepts tend to be more dynamic than the universal discourse-forming concepts. The conceptual dynamism of the nationally-marked concepts manifests itself in the prevalence of the dominant features and the lacunarity at different stages of the American linguo-cultural community existence. The nationally-marked concepts components related to the historical and socio-cultural aspects of the speaking community life are brought into the open in the speeches of American presidents as transmitters of the national cultural values and role-status configurations in the political discourse of the 20 th – early 21 st centuries.

DKPE: Deep KeyPhrase Expansion

Keyphrase provides accurate information of document content that is highly compact, concise, full of meanings, and widely used for discourse comprehension, organization, and text retrieval. Though previous studies have made substantial efforts for automated keyphrase extraction and generation, surprisingly, few studies have been made for KeyPhrase Expansion. This task aims to add more keyphrases for documents (e.g. scientific publications) via taking advantage of document content along with a very limited number of known keyphrases, which can widely be used to improve the keyphrases-involved NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem concerning KeyPhrase Expansion and propose a novel keyphrase expansion method with an encoder–decoder framework. We name it Deep KeyPhrase Expansion (DKPE) since it attempts to capture the deep semantic meaning of the document content together with known keyphrases via a deep learning framework. Specifically, the encoder and the decoder in DKPE play different roles to make full use of the known keyphrases. The former considers the keyphrase-guiding factors, which aggregates information of known keyphrases into context. On the contrary, the latter considers the keyphrase-inhibited factor to inhibit semantically repeated keyphrase generation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model.

Modes of discourse organization in advertising:

O artigo objetiva aplicar os Modos de Organização do Discurso, de Patrick Charaudeau (2019), à campanha publicitária #AvonTáOn (2021). Foi constatada a presença de um narrador descritor, que revela o reposicionamento da Avon. Nota-se nos vídeos que a Avon instaura um comportamento alocutivo a quem assiste aos vídeos e aos personagens que encenam a situação de comunicação. A análise dos modos foi relevante para compreender como ocorre o entrecruzamento entre os estratos imagético e sonoro no estudo de imagens em movimento, além de promoverem considerações sobre o discurso da Avon relacionadas à contemporaneidade. Palavras-chave: Modos de organização do discurso. Avon. Campanha publicitária.

Особенности синтаксиса немецких фронтовых (архивных) документов

The aim of the study is to identify the syntactic characteristics of the structure of German frontline texts as a separate kind of military discourse with its specificity of expression of logical categories associated with them. The paper examines military frontline texts from the perspective of their functional purpose (orders, reports, summary messages, etc.) and also identifies and describes the syntactic means that form the structure of discourse types of speech, i.e., narration, description, reasoning. Frontline texts make up a significant part of the materials in numerous archives and museums in Germany and Russia, but their role and status in military discourse remain open. The study is novel in that it substantiates the identification of a special type functioning on the basis of written communication during hostilities within the framework of military discourse, as opposed to the status discourse form (orders, formal regulations, codes, etc.) and the personal discourse form (communication through field mail) by conducting a comprehensive analysis of the syntactic structure of frontline texts. As a result of the study, it has been found that the texts of frontline discourse are characterized by the following logical links: attribution, conjunction, implication, which possess the appropriate syntactic means of expression. The analysis of the functional and semantic organization of German military frontline documents has shown that syntax can be considered as the basis of the structural organization of both military discourse as a whole and its varieties in the form of frontline texts.

Non-canonical questions at the syntax–prosody interface

This special issue is dedicated to the syntax-prosody interface in non-canonical questions and originated in the international workshop Non-Canonical Questions at the Syntax-Prosody Interface, organised at the Université Paris Cité and held online in November 2020. Recent research has demonstrated that the phonology-syntax relation cannot solely account for prosodic structure, prosody being closely intertwined with discourse organisation, information structure and focus structure (Gussenhoven 1983, Féry 2001). Questions are a case in point, as they crucially call on the addressee before a proposition may be added to the common ground.