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Primary and secondary discourse connectives: definitions and lexicons

Summary

The paper addresses a gap in describing discourse connectives. These expressions signal coherence relations such as cause or contrast between text segments. Because they are syntactically mixed, standard grammars and dictionaries handle them poorly. The authors place connectives within the wider family of discourse relational devices (DRDs), which come from the TextLink COST action. They separate connectives, which link two abstract objects, from one-place spoken discourse markers. Connectives are then split into three groups. Primary connectives are grammaticalized items such as therefore. Secondary connectives are compositional, modifiable phrases such as this caused. Free connecting phrases are open word combinations. Using data from Czech, English, French and German, the authors define the first two groups precisely. They also give guidelines for building lexicons for them, drawing on DiMLex, LexConn and CzeDLex. Their central claim is that lexicons readable by both humans and machines can largely capture how these groups behave. Such lexicons support language learning, cross-lingual comparison and discourse parsing. Secondary connectives matter for parsing in particular: recognizing them lets parsers treat many apparently implicit relations as explicit ones, which are much easier to classify.

Key points

  • The primary/secondary distinction comes from Rysová and Rysová (2014). Primary connectives fall into a nearly closed set of categories: conjunctions, adpositions, adverbs and prepositional phrases. Secondary connectives are built around a lexical "core unit", for example a noun or verb such as reason or cause.
  • The XML lexicon format for primary connectives started with DiMLex for German. It has since been reused for French (LexConn), Italian, English, Portuguese and other languages, and these resources are linked at www.connective-lex.info. Simpler variants, such as one for the Conano annotation tool, can be generated with XSLT scripts.
  • A lexicon of secondary connectives exists only for Czech so far (CzeDLex, after Rysová 2015), so coverage cannot yet be assessed.
  • The motivation for treating secondary connectives as explicit signals is a parsing gap: implicit relations score about 13 F1 points lower than explicit ones (Oepen et al., 2016). The authors also follow PDTB conventions, including Arg1/Arg2 and roughly 30 sense tags.
  • Open problems include the semantics of connective modification (modal or evaluative modifiers) and whether connective senses form a closed list across languages.

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); 1 of them have a page here, 8 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5087/dad.2018.102

@inproceedings{danlos2018primary,
  title = {{Primary and secondary discourse connectives: definitions and lexicons}},
  author = {Danlos, Laurence and Rysova, Katerina and Rysova, Magdalena and Stede, Manfred},
  booktitle = {Dialogue \& Discourse},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5087/dad.2018.102},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5087/dad.2018.102}
}

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