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Lexical marking of discourse relations - some experimental findings

Summary

The paper asks when speakers and writers choose to make a discourse relation explicit with a connective, and how much readers rely on such markers. Instead of adopting one existing taxonomy, the authors group relations from Hobbs, Mann and Thompson, and Sanders et al. into three broad cognitive classes: additive, consequential and contrastive. Experiment 1 tested comprehension. Ten undergraduates freely labelled the relation between 72 pairs of Italian text segments drawn from a multi-genre written corpus. Each pair appeared either in its original form or with the connective removed. Experiment 2 examined production by comparing how often relations were lexically marked in spoken and written versions of narratives. Removing connectives lowered recognition for every class, most sharply for contrastive relations and least for additive ones. In production, contrastive relations were almost always marked in both modes, while additive ones were seldom marked. Speech used more connectives overall. The results suggest that lexical marking is partly governed by relation type and medium, which matters for discourse analysis and text generation.

Key points

  • The stimuli comprised 72 Italian segment pairs: 21 additive, 27 consequential and 24 contrastive. Each subject saw half of the items with the connective and half without, with the assignment counterbalanced across subjects.
  • Correct recognition with vs. without a connective:
    • additive: 72.6% vs. 64.3%
    • consequential: 88.9% vs. 60.2%
    • contrastive: 83.3% vs. 42.7%
  • Without a connective, many misread relations were confused with the additive class. Such confusions reached 27.8% for consequential items and 31.2% for contrastive ones.
  • Share of relations marked by a connective in spoken vs. written narratives:
    • contrastive: 95.3% vs. 91.7%
    • consequential: 59.7% vs. 43.4%
    • additive: roughly 20–25%, rising slightly in writing (+3.2 points)
  • The authors conclude that contrastive relations effectively require a connective, which they attribute to higher cognitive complexity. The overall relative use of the three classes was essentially the same in speech and writing.

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

6 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{soria1998lexical,
  title = {{Lexical marking of discourse relations - some experimental findings}},
  author = {Soria, Claudia and Ferrari, Giacomo},
  booktitle = {Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers},
  year = {1998},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W98-0306/}
}

References

13 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. [i] Black, J. and H. Bern. 1981. "Causal coherence and memory for events in narratives." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20: 267-275. find
  2. [2] Garnham, A., Traxler, M., Oakhill, J. and M.A. Gernsbacher. 1996. "The locus of implicit causality effects in comprehension." Journal of Memory and Language 35: 517-543. find
  3. [3] Hobbs, J. R. 1985. "On the coherence and structure of discourse". Technical Report No. CSLI-85-37, Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, October 1985. find
  4. [4] Hobbs, J.R. 1990. Literature and Cognition. CSLI Lecture Notes. Stanford, CA: CSLI. find
  5. [5] Knott, A. and C. Mellish. 1996. "A feature-based account of the relations signalled by sentence and clause connectives." Language and Speech 39: 143-183. find
  6. [6] Mann, W. C. and S. A. Thompson. 1986. "Relational propositions in discourse". Discourse Processes 9: 57-90. find
  7. [7] Mann, W. C. and S. A. Thompson. 1988. "Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization." Text 8: 243-281. find our card
  8. [8] Noordman, L.G.M. and W. Vonk. 1997. "The different functions of a conjunction in constructing a representation of the discourse." In J. Costermans, M. Fayol (Eds.), Processing [nterclausal Relationships. Mahwah. NJ: Erlbaum, 75-93. find
  9. [9] Sanders, T.J.M., Spooren, W.P.M. and L. G.M. Noordman. 1993. "Coherence relations in a theory of discourse representation." Cognitive Linguistics 4: 93-133. find
  10. [10] Townsend, D.3. and T.G. Bever. 1978. "Inter-clause relations and clausal processing." Journal off Verbal Learning and verbal Behavior 17: 509-521. find
  11. [11] Trabasso, T. and L.L. Sperry. 1985. "Causal relatedness and importance of story events." Journal of Memory and Language 24: 595-611. find
  12. [12] Trabasso, T. and P. van den Brock. 1985. "Causal thinking and representation of narrative events." Journal of Memory and Language 24: 612-630. find
  13. [13] van Dijk, T. A. 1977. Text and Context. London: Longman. find

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