چکیده:
This study was set to reveal how second language learners use rhetorical relations in their written narratives in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) primarily proposed by Mann & Thompson (1987) and developed by Mann، Matthiessen & Thompson (1992). To this end، sixty written narratives based on the picture story book Frog، where are you?’ were collected from EFL learners and were put to the RST for analysis. The results overall indicate that among the 25 rhetorical relations under investigation. sequence، cause cluster، elaboration، circumstance، and concession were the most common relations in the texts. Close scrutiny of the sample RST trees manifests remarkable resemblances at the two upper levels of hierarchical structure and considerable difference at the lower ones. This confirms the crucial importance of temporality، among other things، in sequential events of narrative- Sparse distribution of orientation at certain points and their displacement are other interesting cases which could be attributed to the L1 effect.
خلاصه ماشینی:
com Abstract This study was set to reveal how second language learners use rhetorical relations in their written narratives in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) primarily proposed by Mann & Thompson (1987) and developed by Mann, Matthiessen & Thompson (1992).
Though the theory was first intended for computational text generation, it is applied to other areas including cross-linguistic studies, dialogue and multimedia, as well as discourse analysis, argumentation and writing (Taboada & Mann, 2006b).
However, while there has been a plethora of studies on the discourse structure of narratives on the one hand (see Hemphill, 1999; Kamimura & Oi, 2001; Rubio, 2003; Schiffrin, 2003; Chang, 2004), and the RS analyses of different text types on the other, there are barely any studies, as we understand, on the RS of narratives produced by EFL learners.
Based on the results of their analysis, they determined nine different senses (Attribute, Required operation, Condition, Outcome, Guidance, Co-temporal operation, Option, Prevention, and Possible operations) and seven rhetorical relations (sequence, c-condition, elaboration, purpose, result, means, and concurrency) as typical of instructional texts (Kosseim & Lapalme, 2000).
Majority of the narrative works in the literature on second language learning have had their focus on point of view (Kamimura & Oi, 2001; Shokouhi, Daram & Saba, to appear), referential strategies (Kang, 2004; Shokouhi, 2000; Shokouhi & Kipka, 2003) and contrastive rhetorics (Kaplan, 1966; Kubota, 1988), among other things.