The rhetorical organization of discourse: language revitalisation and the question of authenticity

Abstract

We propose here one approach to unravelling some aspects of authentic discourse construction in a way that may prove useful to teachers and learners of Māori. The approach is illustrated in relation to one text which realises the argument genre in Māori. In terms of text-type, the example provided is an open letter of advice/warning. The approach illustrated here, and the hypotheses emerging from it, are currently being further tested by one of the authors with reference to a corpus of written texts.