reply to Spanjar concerning units

[William Mann]

A previous message which I sent to the list today posted an inquiry from
Bela Spanjar.

I replied to him as shown below.

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Dear Bela Spanjar:

I will be happy to comment on your question, but I suspect that you will be
disappointed.

In RST (as presented in the Text 8(3) article, for example),  the view of
unit selection had only a few criteria, and I am still using those criteria
for my personal analyses.

1) Units should be chosen for the convenience and usefulness of the research
which they are involved in. There are no theoretically privileged kinds of
units. (Saying it another way, for RST the choice of units is
pre-theoretic.)  Sentences, independent clauses, orthographic paragraphs and
chapters of a book have all been proposed and used.

2) Choice of units is intended to get the analysis process started.

3) The text is regarded as a linear sequence.

4) Chosen units should not overlap.

5) All unit choice should precede analysis.

Beyond that, there was an expectation that units for each text to be
analyzed would be chosen on some explicit basis, consistently applied.

So, you have full freedom to choose units by whatever criteria you find
suitable.  I am sure that this is not very helpful.  However, there is the
hope that with new unit choice criteria you will be able to discover things
that others have not seen.

Best wishes,

Bill Mann


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

 bill_mann at sil.org