Signalling of Coherence Relations in Discourse, Beyond Discourse Markers
- We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as Concession or Purpose) are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we conducted a corpus study on the RST Discourse Treebank, a corpus of newspaper articles annotated for rhetorical (or coherence) relations. Results from our corpus study show that most relations in text (over 90%) are signalled and also that most signalled relations (over 80%) are indicated not only by discourse markers (and, but, if, since), but also by a wide variety of signals other than discourse markers, such as reference, lexical, semantic, syntactic and graphical features. These findings suggest that signalling of coherence relations is much more sophisticated than previously thought.
Author details: | Debopam Das, Maite TaboadaORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2017.1379327 |
ISSN: | 0163-853X |
ISSN: | 1532-6950 |
Title of parent work (English): | Discourse processes : DP ; a multidisciplinary journal |
Publisher: | Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group |
Place of publishing: | Abingdon |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2017/11/07 |
Publication year: | 2017 |
Release date: | 2021/06/30 |
Volume: | 55 |
Issue: | 8 |
Number of pages: | 28 |
First page: | 743 |
Last Page: | 770 |
Funding institution: | Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [261104-2008] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |