| Popis: |
The present work describes coherence structure of English and Czech book introductions. The account of coherence is based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Mann and Taboada, 2006) which posits that majority of texts have one main effect which can be described by one of their inventory of thirty-two rhetorical relations; other relations are organized in a hierarchical structure and contribute to the main effect. Out of thirty monographs compiled for each language, four book introductions were chosen to represent the English language and four to represent the Czech language. The data were annotated in terms of rhetorical structure. The qualitative analysis showed that the genre of book introduction does not differ across languages as all texts were described by the same top-level relations; the only difference concerns the position of the goal of the monograph. The queantitative analysis showed that the difference on lower levels concerns the presentation of past research: Czech focused more on presenting elements of subject-matter. Key words: coherence, rhetorical relations, Rhetorical Structure Theory, book introductions, English, Czech, monographs, genre |
