The Structure of Discourse and Subordination.

Abstract

The use and nature of clause combining in natural discourse are explored in this paper. First, a theory of text structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory, is introduced and illustrated for a number of short texts. Then, it is shown how the grammar of clause combining can be explained in terms of the structuring of text. The paper focuses on one particular way of combining clauses and shows how it is used to express a nuclear-satellite structuring of text identified by Rhetorical Structure Theory. Keywords: clause combining, discourse structure, functional grammar, natural language processing, Rhetorical Structure Theory, text generation, test linguistics.

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 1987
Accession Number
ADA181402

Entities

People

  • Christian Matthiessen
  • Sandra A. Thompson

Organizations

  • University of Southern California

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Satellites
  • Computational Science
  • Demographic Cohorts
  • Formal Languages
  • Grammars
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • Social Sciences

Fields of Study

  • Education
  • Linguistics

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation
  • Space