Rhetorical structure theory: A framework for the analysis of texts

Thompson, Sandra A.; Mann, William C.

doi:10.1075/iprapip.1.1.03tho

Article published In: IPrA Papers in Pragmatics
Vol. 1:1 (1987) ► pp.79–105

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download PDF

Rhetorical structure theory

A framework for the analysis of texts

Sandra A. Thompson

William C. Mann

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

Published online: 1 January 1987

https://doi.org/10.1075/iprapip.1.1.03tho

References (26)

Beekman, John, and John Callow. 1974. Translating the Word of God. Grand Rapids, MI. Zondervan Publishing House.

Beekman, John, John Callow, and Michael Kopesec. 1981. The semantic structure of written communication. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Britton, Bruce K. and John B. Black, eds. 1984. Understanding expository text: a theoretical and practical handbook for analyzing explanatory text. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum.

Crothers, Edward. 1979. Paragraph structure inference. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.

Cui, Songren. 1986. A comparison of English and Chinese expository rhetorical structures. UCLA M.A. Thesis.

Fox, Barbara. To appear. Discourse structure and anaphora in written and conversational English. Cambridge University Press.

Grimes, J.E. 1975. The thread of discourse. The Hague: Mouton.

Haiman, John and Sandra A. Thompson. To appear. Clause combining in discourse and grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Hobbs, Jerry. 1979. Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science 31:67-90. BoP

. To appear. On the coherence and structure of discourse. In Polanyi (to appear). Also available as Report CSLI-85-37 from the Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Koffka, Kurt. 1935. Principles of gestalt psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Kohler, Wolfgang. 1929. Gestalt psychology. New York: Liveright.

Longacre, Robert. 1976. An anatomy of speech notions. Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press. BoP.

. 1983. The grammar of discourse: notional and surface structures. New York: Plenum Press.

Mann, William C. 1984. Discourse structures for text generation. ISI Research Report ISI/RR-84-127; available from Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, Ca. 90292-6695.

Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1985. Assertions from discourse structure. Proceedings from the eleventh annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.

. 1986. Relational propositions in discourse. Discourse Processes 9.1:57-90. Also available as an ISI Research Report ISI/RR-83-115 from Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, Ca. 90292-6695. BoP

. To appear a. Rhetorical structure theory: a theory of text organization. In Polanyi, ed. (to appear): Discourse Structure, Ablex, Norwood, N.J., 1987.

. To appear b. Rhetorical structure theory: description and construction of text structures. To appear in Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Text Generation, Nijmegen.

Matthiessen, Christian and Sandra A. Thompson. To appear. The structure of discourse and "subordination". In Haiman and Thompson (to appear).

Meyer, B.J.F. 1984. Prose analysis: purposes, procedures, and problems. In Britton and Black (1984).

Noel, Dirk. 1986. Towards a functional characterization of the news of the BBC World Service. (Antwerp Papers in Linguistics 49.) Antwerp: University of Antwerp.

Pike, Kenneth L. and Evelyn G. Pike. 1983. Text and tagmeme. London: Frances Pinter. BoP

Polanyi, Livia, ed. To appear. Discourse Structure. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Thompson, Sandra A. and William C. Mann. To appear a. Antithesis: a study in clause combining and discourse structure. To appear in a festschrift to be announced. Also Available as ISI Technical Report.

. To appear b. A discourse view of concession in written English. To appear in DeLancey, Scott and Russell Tomlin, eds., Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the Pacific Linguistics Conference.

Cited by (35)

Cited by 35 other publications

Order by:

Batchar, Filipinas & Leonora Mingo

2025. Navigating the Writing Maze: An Exploration of Technical -Vocational- Livelihood Students’ Writing Proficiency. Psychology and Education: A Multidisciplinary Journal 33:4 ► pp. 460 ff.

Silvano, Purificação, Giedrė Valūnaitė Oleškevičienė, Chaya Liebeskind & Mariana Damova

2025. Questions in monologues: an analysis grounded on ISO. Linguistics Vanguard 11:s2 ► pp. 199 ff.

Tordera Yllescas, Juan Carlos & Francisco Gutierrez-Martinez

2025. Las relaciones retóricas y la memoria operativa en la comprensión textual de la población infantil: el desentrañamiento anafórico. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas 20 ► pp. 142 ff.

Kiesel, Dora, Patrick Riehmann, Henning Wachsmuth, Benno Stein & Bernd Froehlich

2021. Visual Analysis of Argumentation in Essays. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 27:2 ► pp. 1139 ff.

Fiacco, James, Elena Cotos & Carolyn Rosé

2019. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, ► pp. 310 ff.

Liu, Feifei & Susan Hood

2019. Rhetorical strategies of political persuasion: The play of irrealis and realis meaning in re/aligning readers in newspaper editorials. Text & Talk 39:5 ► pp. 589 ff.

Parodi, Giovanni & Gina Burdiles

2019. Los pronombres neutros ‘esto’, ‘eso’ y ‘aquello’ como mecanismos encapsuladores en el discurso de la economía. Spanish in Context 16:1 ► pp. 104 ff.

Kaplan, Dain, Takenobu Tokunaga & Simone Teufel

2016. Citation Block Determination Using Textual Coherence. Journal of Information Processing 24:3 ► pp. 540 ff.

Stoyanova, Nataliya

2016. Resistenza all’acquisizione della struttura del discorso e della gerarchizzazione sintattica in un corpus acquisizionale italo-russo. In Le lingue slave tra struttura e uso [Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici, 31], ► pp. 305 ff.

Zakowski, Samuel

2016. She was twelve years old: on γάρ and Mark 5:42. Glotta 92:1 ► pp. 305 ff.

Bachand, Félix-Hervé, Elnaz Davoodi & Leila Kosseim

2014. An Investigation on the Influence of Genres and Textual Organisation on the Use of Discourse Relations. In Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8403], ► pp. 454 ff.

Massé-Arkan, Pascale

2013. How demonstrative determiners cil and cist contribute to text grammar and discourse comprehension in Old French narratives. zrph 129:3 ► pp. 559 ff.

Sergeant, Alan

2013. Automatic Argumentation Extraction. In The Semantic Web: Semantics and Big Data [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7882], ► pp. 656 ff.

Camacho, Roberto Gomes

2011. Classes de palavras na perspectiva da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional: o papel da nominalização no continuum categorial,

Cantoni, Virginio, Stefano Levialdi & Bertrand Zavidovique

2011. Channeling the Information. In 3C Vision, ► pp. 177 ff.

Hashimoto, Kiyota & Kazuhiro Takeuchi

2011. 2011 3rd International Conference on Awareness Science and Technology (iCAST), ► pp. 270 ff.

Hashimoto, Kiyota & Kazuhiro Takeuchi

2011. 2011 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE 2011), ► pp. 1049 ff.

Connolly, John H, Alan Chamberlain & Iain W Phillips

2006. A discourse-based approach to human-computer communication. Semiotica 2006:160

Lundquist, Lita

2005. Noms, verbes et anaphores (in) fidèles. Pourquoi les Danois sont plus fidèles que les Français. Langue française n° 145:1 ► pp. 73 ff.

Binnick, Robert I.

2003. Tense and aspect. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 1 ff.

Binnick, Robert I.

2020. Aspect and Aspectuality. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 183 ff.

Asher, Nicholas

2002. Computation and Storage in Discourse Interpretation. In Storage and Computation in the Language Faculty [Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, 30], ► pp. 299 ff.

Ramsay, Guy

2000. Linearity in rhetorical organisation: a comparative cross‐cultural analysis of newstext from the People's Republic of China and Australia. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 10:2 ► pp. 241 ff.

Ramsay, Guy

2001. What are they getting at?Placement of important ideas in lengthy Chinese newstext. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 24:2 ► pp. 17 ff.

Kees Hengeveld

1997. References. In The Theory of Functional Grammar. Part 2. Complex and Derived Constructions,

Bateman, John A.

1996. Review of Paris (1993): User Modelling in Text Generation. Functions of Language 3:1 ► pp. 138 ff.

Bowerman, C. & S. Stobart

1995. Proceedings of the 1995 International Symposium and Workshop on Systems Engineering of Computer Based Systems, ► pp. 429 ff.

Jordan, Jerry M.

1994. Plan monitoring in conversations: An exploration of on‐line cognitive activity. Communication Studies 45:2 ► pp. 159 ff.

Schiffrin, Deborah

1994. Making a list. Discourse Processes 17:3 ► pp. 377 ff.

Lascarides, Alex & Nicholas Asher

1993. Temporal interpretation, discourse relations and commonsense entailment. Linguistics and Philosophy 16:5 ► pp. 437 ff.

BOWERMAN, CHRIS

1992. WRITING AND THE COMPUTER: AN INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEMS SOLUTION. In Computer Assisted Learning: Selected Contributions from the CAL '91 Symposium, ► pp. 77 ff.

Linden, Keith, Susanna Cumming & James Martin

1992. Using system networks to build rhetorical structures. In Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 587], ► pp. 183 ff.

Sanders, Ted J. M., Wilbert P. M. Spooren & Leo G. M. Noordman

1992. Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes 15:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Zammuner, Vanda Lucia

1991. Children’s writing of argumentative texts: Effects of indirect instruction. European Journal of Psychology of Education 6:2 ► pp. 243 ff.

[no author supplied]

2016. Insight and Intelligence. In Intelligent Enterprise in the Era of Big Data, The, ► pp. 51 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 march 2026. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.