Challenges and Future Directions of Rhetorical Structure Theory
Rhetorical Structure Theory and Its Applications - Past, Present and Future - Bo Wang
Bo Wang [+]
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau
Bo Wang received his doctoral degree from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include systemic functional linguistics, translation studies, discourse analysis, and language description. He is co-author of Lao She's Teahouse and Its Two English Translations (Routledge), Translating Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese (Routledge) and Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics (Springer). He is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Macau, China.
Yuanyi Ma [+]
Yuanyi Ma received her doctoral degree from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include systemic functional linguistics, translation studies, discourse analysis, and language description. She is co-author of Lao She's Teahouse and Its Two English Translations (Routledge), Translating Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese (Routledge) and Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics (Springer). She is an independent researcher in China.
Description
In Chapter 6, we first introduce the criticisms and challenges to RST, such as Cloran, Stuart-Smith and Young’s (2007) comparison of RST with other discourse analytical tools and their criticisms of RST. In addition, we point out some possibilities of RST research in the future by answering some questions such as (i) How to carry out reliable analysis based on RST? (ii) In which areas are applications of RST needed? (iii) What are the pedagogical implications of RST? (iv) What further works on systemicizing RST in SFL are needed (see Matthiessen, Wang & Ma forthcoming)?