Signalling coherence in Austrian students‘ seminar papers: macro- and micro-structural cues
Based on a corpus of Austrian students’ texts from three disciplines (personnel
management, business psychology, economic history) analysed with Rhetorical
Structure Theory (RST), this paper investigates the macro-structural expectations
which tables of content (ToCs) raise, the cues by which these expectations
are triggered, and the “predictive quality” of ToCs. The ToCs in the personnel
management group’s texts offer the best “prediction” of the actual macrostructures,
whereas in the other two groups ToC and textual macro-structures
diverge from each other in various ways. The analysis also shows a high degree
of similarity between relation cues at the textual micro- and macro-levels. The
results are discussed with respect to genre differences, student writers’ generic
competence and institutional factors of students’ text production.