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Visualizing structural “inverted pyramids” in English news discourse across levels

  • Hongxin Zhang

    Hongxin Zhang is a lecturer and PhD candidate at Zhejiang University, China. Her research interests include quantitative linguistics, discourse analysis and dependency grammar. Her recent work has been published in Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics and Glottometrics.

    and Haitao Liu

    Haitao Liu is a Qiushi distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Zhejiang University and Chair professor of linguistics at Ningbo Institute of Technology. His research interests include text analysis, quantitative linguistics and language complex networks. He is the author of 150+ scientific publications about language and linguistics, more than 40 publications indexed within the Web of Science.

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From the journal Text & Talk

Abstract

Drawing on an analogy between discourse and syntactic trees, this paper chooses 359 Wall Street Journal articles with multiple paragraphs from the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) Discourse Treebank, and converts each discourse tree into three additional dependency ones, at discourse, paragraph and sentence levels, with exclusively elementary discourse units of clauses, sentences and paragraphs, respectively. It empirically tests and visually presents the genre-specific “summary+details” or “inverted pyramid” structuring of news discourse. It further extends the idea of inverted pyramid structuring to the paragraph and sentence levels. It proves that the body of the report also has a similar schematic top-down installment organization with macro-propositions on top. It also visually and statistically presents the rhetorical structures at sentence level, which differ to some extent from grammatical structures. Operated in line with the compositionality criterion and hierarchy principle of RST, the converted trees provide unique analytical advantages and constitute new research prospects.

Funding statement: Funding: This work was supported by the Department of Education of Zhejiang Province, China (Grant No. Y201223584); and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11&ZD188).

About the authors

Hongxin Zhang

Hongxin Zhang is a lecturer and PhD candidate at Zhejiang University, China. Her research interests include quantitative linguistics, discourse analysis and dependency grammar. Her recent work has been published in Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics and Glottometrics.

Haitao Liu

Haitao Liu is a Qiushi distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Zhejiang University and Chair professor of linguistics at Ningbo Institute of Technology. His research interests include text analysis, quantitative linguistics and language complex networks. He is the author of 150+ scientific publications about language and linguistics, more than 40 publications indexed within the Web of Science.

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to the anonymous referees for their detailed and constructive comments. Also, we sincerely appreciate Timothy Osborne’s and Chunshan Xu’s help in proofreading the paper. Thanks also go to Haiqi Wu, who helped with data for the research.

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Published Online: 2016-3-9
Published in Print: 2016-1-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

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