The structure of discourse and ‘subordination’

Abstract : The use and nature of clause combining in natural discourse are explored in this paper. First, a theory of text structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory, is introduced and illustrated for a number of short texts. Then, it is shown how the grammar of clause combining can be explained in terms of the structuring of text. The paper focuses on one particular way of combining clauses and shows how it is used to express a nuclear-satellite structuring of text identified by Rhetorical Structure Theory. Keywords: clause combining, discourse structure, functional grammar, natural language processing, Rhetorical Structure Theory, text generation, test linguistics.