An inquiry about units in RST

[William Mann]

Earlier this month I received an inquiry about RST units.  With permission,
I am posting the whole message below.

I sent a reply, and I plan to post that as a separate message.

Bill Mann


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Dear Sir,

My name is Bela Spanjar and I am a student at the Free
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
I am currently writing my MA dissertation on grammar and
text structures in children's literature. I am using RST to
divided the corpus of texts into discourse units, and use
the units for further analysis in a database.

My problem is the following. In all of the texts I find the
following constructions:
'"That's nice," said Mrs Chalmers. "The head will be
pleased."'
So far I have use Leech and Short (1981) and Semino et al.
(1997), who claim that the two spoken parts are direct
speech, dependent on the reporting clause. The full stop has
only increased a textual/hierarchical distance and does not
have the power to turn the second part of spoken speech into
free direct speech.

However, I would argue that there are three units here, the
reporting clause being a circumstance. Does this make sense?

I would much appreciate to read your view on this matter.

Sincerely,

Bela Spanjar


( bgc.spanjar at let.vu.nl )


=============================
 William C. Mann
SIL in USA
6739 Cross Creek Estates Road
Lancaster, SC 29720
USA
(803) 286-6461

 bill_mann at sil.org