Cognitive complexity and the linguistic marking of coherence relations: A parallel corpus study

Abstract

Coherence relations can be made linguistically explicit by means of connectives (e.g., but, because) or cue phrases (e.g., on the other hand, which is why), but can also be left implicit and conveyed through the juxtaposition of two clauses or sentences. However, it seems that not all relations are equally easy to reconstruct when they are implicit. In this paper, we explore which features of coherence relations make them more, or less, likely to be conveyed implicitly. We adopt the assumption that expected relations are more often implicit than relations that are not expected, and propose to determine a relation's expectedness using the notion of cognitive complexity. We test our hypotheses by means of a parallel corpus study, in which we analyze the translations of explicit English coherence relations from the Europarl Direct corpus into four target languages: Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. We find that cognitive complexity indeed influences the linguistic marking of coherence relations, and that this does not vary between the languages in our corpus. In addition, we find that a relation's relational and syntactic dependency also influences its linguistic marking, but that these measures are not completely independent of relation type.

Connective-Lex: A Web-Based Multilingual Lexical Resource for Connectives

“…They examined in what way the non-/substitutability in certain contexts can be explained by cognitive-linguistic features and argue that those features that had been used in the Cognitive Approach to Coherence Relations (CCR - Sanders et al, 1992) are appropriate for the task. Recently, working in the same framework, Hoek et al (2017) studied the translations of English connectives in four languages of the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) in order to determine factors for the decision whether to also use a connective in the target language or to leave the relation implicit. This question was also investigated in a study by Zufferey (2016).…”

Unifying dimensions in coherence relations: How various annotation frameworks are related

“…This research program is far from finished, however, and is currently being tested on more languages. In addition, the CCR-dimensions have been used to annotate corpora of coherence relations (Sanders and Scholman 2015;Sanders et al 2012), children's language use (Evers-Vermeul 2005; van Veen 2011), parallel corpora (Hoek et al 2017b), and to organize the complex task of relation annotation in a step-wise approach (Scholman et al 2016).…”

“…This observation raises several important issues for discourse annotation. One question is whether some relation types are more often conveyed implicitly or by the use of alternative signals than others, and if so, what the causes of these differences are (Asr and Demberg 2012;Das and Taboada 2018;Hoek et al 2017b;Taboada 2006). To address these issues, the development of extensive and comparable sets of annotated data with coherence relations across several languages and genres will represent a major step ahead.…”

A Corpus-Based Analysis of English Past Perfect Tense in Written and Spoken English

“…After learners of English are given brief deductive instructions of important terms and rules, they shall be guided to focus on the key aspect of the grammatical feature such as how and when the students should use it. If English learners are going to form past perfect sentences communicatively or spontaneously, grammatical accuracy alone is insufficient because grammar should be taught to serve communicative purposes with consideration for its form, meaning, and use (Hoek, Zufferey, Evers-Vermeul, & Sanders, 2017).…”