32.1939, FYI: Maite Taboada ExLing Tutorial

Fri Jun 4 10:52:10 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1939. Fri Jun 04 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1939, FYI: Maite Taboada ExLing Tutorial

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Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2021 06:50:11
From: Antonis Botinis [info at exlingsociety.com]
Subject: Maite Taboada ExLing Tutorial

Finding discourse relations

In this talk, I will do two things. First, I will discuss the space that
discourse or rhetorical relations occupy in language, and the issue of
consensus on a common taxonomy of relations. Second, I will review the issue
of signals for coherence relations and describe our corpus annotation of a
broad set of signals.

First, in terms of the space that rhetorical relations occupy and their
classification, I propose a top-down approach, that is, one that views
relations between propositions in discourse as relations that help create
coherence. I will review different approaches to rhetorical, coherence and
conjunctive relations, and explain where Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and
Thompson, 1988) fits in with other proposals. Coherence is part of texture,
and thus related to entity-based coherence or cohesion (Halliday and Hasan,
1976) and to general properties of discourse. I will argue that there is a
cline of grammaticalization of rhetorical relations, from discourse to syntax,
and that differences across theories are sometimes rooted in where in that
cline the theory positions itself. For instance, RST is at the end of the
cline closer to discourse, and does not make strong claims about the syntactic
realization of rhetorical relations. The conjunctive relations of Halliday and
Hasan (1976) and Martin (1992), on the other hand, are more clearly syntactic,
and have lexical elements as signals of the relation. My optimistic view is
that, in this broad space of rhetorical relations, we can map relations across
different theories if we bear in mind that they may be more or less abstract
versions of each other.

In the second part of the talk, I will discuss signalling. In this sense of
rhetorical relations as relations of coherence, the relations are present
whether signalled by a particular device or not. This is the long-held view
within Rhetorical Structure Theory. The concern in RST has been to explain how
coherence, and the impression of coherence, is achieved when relations are
apparently not signalled. Signalling has traditionally been taken to refer to
conjunctions or discourse markers which link propositions. I will propose that
signalling is actually quite prevalent, if we broaden our definition of
signalling devices. I will report on the results of our annotation (Das and
Taboada, 2018a, 2018b) of the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al., 2002),
which shows that the vast majority of relations are signalled by at least one
device, according to our annotation of the RST-DT, available through the
Linguistic Data Consortium (Das et al., 2015). I will describe the annotation
process, the taxonomy of signalling devices, and will provide detail on the
types of signalling devices found for various relations.

Selected references

Carlson, Lynn, Daniel Marcu & Mary Ellen Okurowski. 2002. RST Discourse
Treebank, LDC2002T07 [Corpus]. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.

Das, Debopam & Maite Taboada. 2018a. RST Signalling Corpus: A corpus of
signals of coherence relations. Language Resources and Evaluation 52(1).
149-184.

Das, Debopam & Maite Taboada. 2018b. Signalling of coherence relations in
discourse, beyond discourse markers. Discourse Processes 55(8). 743-770.

Das, Debopam, Maite Taboada & Paul McFetridge. 2015. RST Signalling Corpus.
Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.

Halliday, Michael A. K. & Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London:
Longman.

Mann, William C. & Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical Structure Theory:
Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8(3). 243-281.

Martin, James R. 1992. English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

More Information Here:
https://exlingsociety.com/maite-taboada.html

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis

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