Introduction + RST

[Maite Taboada]

Hello All,

The Introduction bit:

Maite Taboada, PhD student in Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense,
in Madrid, sunny, warm and nice Spain. Right now, I'm an instructor in the
Dept. of Linguistics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton,
not-so-sunny-and-warm-but-still-nice Canada.

I work in a whole bunch of things, mostly from a systemic functional point
of view. I did some work in computational linguistics (discourse processing
of spoken language for Machine Translation), at Carnegie Mellon University,
and I'm still interested in formalizing the structure of conversation,
mainly task-oriented dialogue. My dissertation describes discourse
structures (RST), cohesion (a la Halliday & Hasan) and thematic progression
in conversation, English and Spanish.

The RST bit:

Yes! Let's talk about RST! I've gone into dangerous territory, and used it
to describe spoken language. It has been a lot of fun, because all the
concepts of intentionality and effect on the reader (hearer in my case)
take on a new meaning. I still found it to be an excellent tool, and it
describes beautifully how two interactants build a text together. I have a
paper on it that I'll make available through my web page as soon as I get
round to it.

Cheers,

- Maite

		Maite Taboada
Department of Linguistics	Ph:  (403) 492-3480
4-20 Assiniboia Hall		Fax: (403) 492-0806
University of Alberta		e-mail: mtaboada at ualberta.ca
Edmonton, Alberta		or: 	flingz7 at sis.ucm.es
T6G 2E7 Canada			http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~taboada

Note: The area code will change to (780) Jan. 25, 1999