The aim of this paper is to set up criteria to identify the implicit relations held by adverbial gerund clauses in formal speeches (university lectures) and oral interviews in Brazilian Portuguese. The theoretical framework consists of two functional linguistic theories: Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). According to RST, besides the explicit content conveyed by text sentences, there are implicit relations that connect text segments. In this study, the identification of such relations was based on the FDG parameters of factuality and presupposition, and the layers of the representational and interpersonal levels. Means, result, condition, and purpose rhetorical relations were attested in the corpus. Other rhetorical relations such circumstance (anteriority, posteriority, simultaneity), concession, and cause may also be attested in further research. FDG parameters have shown to be efficient for the identification of rhetorical relations.
RST; Rhetorical structure theory; FDG; Functional discourse grammar; Adverbial gerund clauses
