Abstract The notion of genre has been widely explored using quantitative methods from both lexical and syntactical perspectives. However, discourse structure has rarely been used to examine genre. Mostly concerned with the interrelation of discourse units, discourse structure can play a crucial role in genre analysis. Nevertheless, few quantitative studies have explored genre distinctions from a discourse structure perspective. Here, we use two English discourse corpora (RST-DT and GUM) to investigate discourse structure from a novel viewpoint. The RST-DT is divided into four small subcorpora distinguished according to genre, and another corpus (GUM) containing seven genres are used for cross-verification. An RST (rhetorical structure theory) tree is converted into dependency representations by taking information from RST annotations to calculate the discourse distance through a process similar to that used to calculate syntactic dependency distance. Moreover, the data on dependency representations deriving from the two corpora are readily convertible into network data. Afterwards, we examine different genres in the two corpora by combining discourse distance and discourse network. The two methods are mutually complementary in comprehensively revealing the distinctiveness of various genres. Accordingly, we propose an effective quantitative method for assessing genre differences using discourse distance and discourse network. This quantitative study can help us better understand the nature of genre.

中文翻译：

---

通过话语距离和话语网络研究体裁差异

摘要 从词汇和句法的角度使用定量方法广泛探索了体裁的概念。然而，语篇结构很少被用来考察体裁。语篇结构主要关注语篇单元的相互关系，在体裁分析中起着至关重要的作用。然而，很少有定量研究从话语结构的角度探讨体裁差异。在这里，我们使用两个英语语篇语料库（RST-DT 和 GUM）从一个新的角度研究语篇结构。RST-DT根据体裁分为四个小的子语料库，另一个包含七个体裁的语料库（GUM）用于交叉验证。通过从 RST 注释中获取信息，通过类似于用于计算句法依存距离的过程来计算话语距离，将 RST（修辞结构理论）树转换为依存表示。此外，来自两个语料库的依赖表示数据很容易转换为网络数据。然后，我们通过结合话语距离和话语网络来检查两个语料库中的不同类型。两种方法相辅相成，全面揭示了不同体裁的独特性。因此，我们提出了一种使用话语距离和话语网络来评估体裁差异的有效定量方法。这种定量研究可以帮助我们更好地理解体裁的本质。