Article published in:
The Pragmatics of Discourse Coherence: Theories and applications
Edited by Helmut Gruber and Gisela Redeker
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 254] 2014
► pp. 267–291

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.
Published online: 26 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.254.10gru
References
Bärenfänger, Maja, Marco Hilbert, Henning Lobin, Harald Lüngen, and Csilla Puskás
2006 “Cues and Constraints for the Relational Discourse Analysis of Complext Text Types – The Role of Logical and Generic Document Structure.” In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Constraints in Discourse (CiD 2006) , Maynooth, Ireland, ed. by Candy Snider, John Harpur, Anton Benz, and Peter Kühnlein, 27–35. Available at: http://​www​.constraints​-in​-discourse​.org​/cid06/
Bateman, John A.
2008 Multimodality and Genre. A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Czinglar, Christine, and Karin Wetschanow
2006 “Metakommunikation.” In Genre, Habitus und wissenschaftliches Schreiben, ed. by Helmut Gruber, Markus Rheindorf, Karin ­Wetschanow, Martin Reisigl, Peter Muntigl, and Christine Czinglar, 117–141. Münster: LIT-Verlag.Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard
1980 Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. New York: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gruber, Helmut
2006a “Die Kohärenzstruktur der Seminararbeiten.” In Genre, Habitus und wissenschaftliches Schreiben, ed. by Helmut Gruber, Markus Rheindorf, Karin Wetschanow, Martin Reisigl, Peter Muntigl, and Christine Czinglar, 91–117. Münster: LIT Verlag.Google Scholar
2006b “Rhetorical Structure Theory and Quality Assessment of Students’ Texts.” Information Design Journal & Document Design 14 (2): 114–129. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2007 “Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis.” In Empirical Approaches to Discourse Analysis, ed. by Helmut Gruber, Martin Kaltenbacher, and Peter Muntigl, 51–88. Frankfurt am Main; Wien [u.a.]: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Gruber, Helmut, Peter Muntigl, Martin Reisigl, Markus Rheindorf, Karin Wetschanow, and Christine Czinglar
2006 Genre, Habitus und wissenschaftliches Schreiben. Münster: LIT Verlag.Google Scholar
Gruber, Helmut, and Birgit Huemer
2008 “Two Views on Text Structure: Using Rhetorical Structure Theory and Register and Genre Theory in Improving Students’ Academic Writing.” Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication 29: 332–365.Google Scholar
Mann, William C., Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, and Sandra A. Thompson
1992 “Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis.” In Discourse Descriptions, ed. by William Mann, and Sandra Thompson, 39–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mann, William C., and Sandra A. Thompson
1988 “Rhetorical Structure Theory: Towards a Functional Theory of Text Organization.” Text 8 (3): 243–281.Google Scholar
Marcu, Daniel
2000 “The Rhetorical Parsing of Unrestricted Texts: A Surface-based Approach.” Computational Linguistics 26 (3): 395–448. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Martin, James R.
1992 English Text. System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Muntigl, Peter
2006 “Die Makrostruktur der Seminararbeiten.” In Genre, Habitus und wissenschaftliches Schreiben, ed. by Helmut Gruber, Markus Rheindorf, Karin Wetschanow, Martin Reisigl, Peter Muntigl, and Christine Czinglar, 67–91. Münster: LIT Verlag.Google Scholar
O’Donnell, Mick
2004 RSTTool. Available at: http:​/www​.wagsoft​.com​/RSTTool/Google Scholar
Swales, John
1990 Genre Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taboada, Maite
2006 “Discourse Markers as Signals (or not) of Rhetorical Relations.” Journal of Pragmatics 38 (4): 567–592. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 “Implicit and Explicit Coherence Relations.” In Discourse, of Course. An Overview of Research in Discourse Studies, ed. by Jan Renkema, 127–143. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Taboada, Maite, and William C. Mann
2006 “Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking Back and Moving Ahead.” Discourse Studies 8 (3): 423–459. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Teufel, Simone, Jean Carletta, and Marc Moens
1999 “An Annotation Scheme for Discourse-Level Argumentation in Research Articles.” Proceedings of EACL ’99 , 110–117. Available at: http://​www​.cl​.cam​.ac​.uk​/~sht25​/papers​/eacl99​.pdf