The linguistic marking of coherence relations

Hoek, Jet; Zufferey, Sandrine; Evers-Vermeul, Jacqueline; Sanders, Ted

doi:10.1075/pc.18016.hoe

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Das and Taboada (2018), for example, identified five categories of linguistic cues that can signal coherence relations: reference, semantic, lexical, syntactic, and graphical features. Hoek et al (2018) identified three distinct ways in which segment-internal elements, such as negation words and verb tense, can systematically interact with connectives to express a relation. Although these recent efforts have provided more insight into the types and functioning of segment-internal signals that can be identified in texts, more work is needed to investigate their effects on comprehenders.…”

Section: Coherence Relational Signalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in expecting coherence relations: Exploring the variability in sensitivity to contextual signals in discourse

Scholman

Demberg

Sanders

2020

Discourse Processes

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The current study investigated how a contextual list signal influences comprehenders' inference generation of upcoming discourse relations and whether individual differences in working memory capacity and linguistic experience influence the generation of these inferences. Participants were asked to complete two-sentence stories, the first sentence of which contained an expression of quantity (a few, multiple). Several individual-difference measures were calculated to explore whether individual characteristics can explain the sensitivity to the contextual list signal. The results revealed that participants were sensitive to a contextual list signal (i.e., they provided list continuations), and this sensitivity was modulated by the participants' linguistic experience, as measured by an author recognition test. The results showed no evidence that working memory affected participants' responses. These results extend prior research by showing that contextual signals influence participants' coherence-relation-inference generation. Further, the results of the current study emphasize the importance of individual reader characteristics when it comes to coherence-relation inferences. When comprehenders understand discourse, they understand more than what is explicitly stated: They create connections between clauses and sentences that are left implicit in the discourse. These connections, known as coherence relations, are needed to create a coherent mental representation of the text (Sanders & Noordman, 2000; Sanders et al., 1992). Comprehenders can make use of different sources of information to infer coherence relations. The most-well-studied type of cues that direct the interpretation process is the prototypical relational marker: connectives and cue phrases such as because and for example. Relations that are signaled by such markers are referred to as explicit relations. Many relations are in fact left implicit; that is, they are not marked by a connective or cue phrase (over 50% of relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank, see Prasad et al., 2007). For such relations, comprehenders can exploit regularities of signals that tend to co-occur with specific types of relations (these regularities will be referred to as relational signals from now on). Relational signals include lexico-semantic word pairs such as good-bad and many-one of these (

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Section: Coherence Relational Signalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in expecting coherence relations: Exploring the variability in sensitivity to contextual signals in discourse

Scholman

Demberg

Sanders

2020

Discourse Processes

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“…It is a longstanding idea that discourse relations are signaled through complex means that include, but go beyond, the presence of discourse markers (Asr and Demberg, 2015; Das and Taboada, 2018;Hoek et al, 2018;Prasad et al, 2010). Our study provides experimental evidence that confirms that readers are sensitive to subtle discourse cues, both in judging the coherence of discourse and in processing discourse relations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical and contextual cue effects in discourse expectations: Experimenting with German 'zwar...aber' and English 'true/sure...but'

Schwab

Liu²

2020

dad

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Existing literature shows that readers and listeners rapidly adjust their expectations about likely discourse continuations through discourse markers, as well as through other linguistic and extra-linguistic cues. However, it is unclear whether (i) the facilitative effects of various (extra-)linguistic cues differ in quality and (ii) whether the effects interact with one another in any principled manner. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments on concessive constructions in German and English wherein optional lexical and/or contextual cues appeared ahead of the concessive discourse marker. The results demonstrate that readers can use both types of cues to anticipate the upcoming discourse relation. Our study thus provides novel evidence for expectation-driven accounts of discourse processing and elucidates the functions of discourse signals. Furthermore, the results also show that the role that a type of cues plays is subject to cross-linguistic variation.

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“…In this precise study, Hoek et al (2018) do not distinguish among the coherence relations that may be and relations that may not be temporally characterized (e.g. in some cases, additive relations may have a temporal interpretation, which can be either synchronous or chronological).…”

Section: Implicit and Overtly Marked Temporal Relationsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…They find a pattern in the distribution of explicit and implicit relations: relations such as Conjunction, Contrast, Concession, Synchrony, Asynchrony and Condition are most often overtly marked, whereas relations such as Cause, Instantiation and Restatement are most often left implicit. Furthermore, Hoek et al (2018) show, by means of a parallel corpus study, that the implicit versus overt marking status of coherence relations depends not only on the relation itself but also on the cognitive complexity associated to each type of coherence relations (based on the Cognitive Complexity of Coherence Relations framework developed by Sanders et al, 1992, and later work 1 ), among other factors. For example, they find that coherence relations with basic order are more often implicit than relations with non-basic order, and that conditional relations are less often implicit than causal or additive ones (Hoek et al, 2018: 127).…”

Section: Implicit and Overtly Marked Temporal Relationsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Problematically, the linguistic elements functioning as signals do not directly signal specific coherence relations and they are categorized or grouped with great difficulty (but see Hoek's, 2018 proposal to categorise segment-internal elements as signals of coherence). In contrast, our knowledge about both discourse connectives, whether they are specialized or underspecified, is much more stable.…”

Section: Implicit and Overtly Marked Temporal Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Temporal Relations at the Sentence and Text Genre Level: The Role of Linguistic Cueing and Non-linguistic Biases—An Annotation Study of a Bilingual Corpus

Grisot

Blochowiak

2021

Corpus Pragmatics

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This study investigates the role of non-linguistic biases in the obligatory (verb tenses) and optional (discourse connectives) linguistic marking for inferring temporal relations at the sentence and the text genre levels. Specifically, we formulated and tested several assumptions: (1) the linguistic cueing assumption (verb tenses inform language users about the temporal relation), (2) the implicitness assumption (highly expected relations need not be overtly marked), (3) the specialized connective assumption (specialized connectives are more efficient than underspecified ones), (4) the text genre assumption (language users’ expectations of temporal relations are linked to the text genre), and (5) the text status assumption (information in translated texts tends to be more explicit than in original texts). We carried out an annotation study of a bilingual corpus (French–English) belonging to two different text genres: literary and journalistic. Our results challenge the implicitness and the text status assumptions while confirming the linguistic cueing and the text genre assumptions. So, we put forth an alternative view, according to which language users have equal expectations about all three types of temporal relations and are oriented to one relation or the other by linguistic cueing (obligatory and optional marking) as well as text genre.

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The linguistic marking of coherence relations

Cited by 11 publications

References 44 publications

Individual differences in expecting coherence relations: Exploring the variability in sensitivity to contextual signals in discourse

Individual differences in expecting coherence relations: Exploring the variability in sensitivity to contextual signals in discourse

Lexical and contextual cue effects in discourse expectations: Experimenting with German 'zwar...aber' and English 'true/sure...but'

Temporal Relations at the Sentence and Text Genre Level: The Role of Linguistic Cueing and Non-linguistic Biases—An Annotation Study of a Bilingual Corpus

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