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Factors Influencing the Implicitation of Discourse Relations across Languages

Summary

Connectives such as because or although are optional, yet some discourse relations survive without them far better than others. Earlier monolingual work, notably on the Penn Discourse Tree Bank, linked this to reader expectations, specifically the causality-by-default and continuity hypotheses. Hoek and Zufferey ask whether these tendencies also hold across languages. They used Europarl Direct, which contains only text originally produced in the source language. From it they sampled English fragments with also, because, although and if, and manually classified how each was rendered in Dutch, German, French and Spanish: with a connective, implicitly, or through a paraphrase or syntactic construction. The four connectives were chosen to represent features from the Sanders et al. (1992) taxonomy, mainly polarity and basic operation. Overall implicitation rates varied by target language, but the relative ranking of relations was similar everywhere. Additive relations were dropped more often than causal ones, which contradicts causality-by-default. Conditionals were never implicitated. The authors therefore propose that default, easily implicit relations are those that are cognitively simplest.

Key points

  • The data come from Europarl Direct (English source; Dutch, German, French and Spanish targets), with roughly 180–390 relevant relations per connective and language.
  • If was never made implicit in any target language (0/201 to 0/241). Concessive although was rarely dropped, ranging from 7/248 in Dutch to 1/261 in Spanish.
  • In every target language, also (positive additive) was implicitated significantly more often than although and if. Additive relations also outnumbered causal ones in implicit renderings everywhere except Dutch (p=0.16).
  • Spanish translations were the most explicit, and Dutch and French the least. Examples: also 7/195 in Spanish vs. 19/194 in Dutch; because 4/393 in Spanish vs. 27/383 in Dutch.
  • The authors argue that default interpretations can also block implicitation, since no implicit additive relation allowed a causal reading. They suggest that negative polarity, non-basic segment order and conditionality add cognitive complexity and so require explicit marking.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

9 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 6 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{hoek2015factors,
  title = {{Factors Influencing the Implicitation of Discourse Relations across Languages}},
  author = {Hoek, Jet and Zufferey, Sandrine},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-11)},
  year = {2015},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W15-0205/}
}

References

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