Laymen occasionally have to write texts in specialized domains, such as when interacting with the public administration. However, in Spanish, most studies related to administrative texts have focused on texts written by the administration for laymen rather than texts that average citizens write to the administration. Against this backdrop, this article aims to carry out the following: a linguistic analysis on a corpus of Spanish-language texts from five textual genres written by laymen and addressed to the public administration on the (...) textual, lexical and discourse levels; a contrastive analysis that applies statistical techniques to quantitative data to identify significant differences among these textual genres. The results show a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of each genre. Also, the statistical results indicate that there are significant differences among some of the analyzed genres. (shrink)

In accordance with the compositionality criterion and hierarchy principle of Rhetorical Structure Theory, this study reframes each tree in the RST Discourse Treebank into three new dependency trees with ultimate nodes being clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, respectively, which also draw on an analogy between syntactic and discourse trees. Detailed percentages of various RST relations at the three granularity levels are examined, illuminating the discourse processes of organizing units of one granularity level into those of the next upper level and suggesting (...) certain homogeneity and interaction across levels in the Treebank, particularly at the two upper levels. The study demonstrates the applicability of RST analysis between same-level terminal units. With unique analytical advantages, the newly constructed discourse dependency trees provide new research prospects. (shrink)