Relations that are seldom or never signaled

[Manfred Stede]

Regarding the possibly, but maybe not, always-signalled concession:

Claudia wrote:
>According to an experiment of mine, the "Antithesis", "Concession",
>"Otherwise" and "Contrast" relations are almost always signalled (>
90%).
>...
>However, since in my data there were instances of contrastive relations

>which were not marked, it would be interesting to verify Manfred's
>assumptions that i) a connective is always needed and ii) this
connective
>cannot be of the "weak" type such as "and".

Just to clarify, my suggestion was limited to Concession, but given the
list mentioned by Claudia, I would extend it to Otherwise. Not to
Contrast, though, which can arise, amongst others,  from lexical
opposition of the predicates. Thus I find the strong tendency for
signalled contrasts, which Claudia reports, surprising - especially in
spoken language, where intonation can also help to mark a contrast.
Interesting!

Bill wrote:
>In one of the early papers there was a Concession example as follows:
>You have excellent credentials.
>I am looking for someone with excellent experience.

Mmmh, maybe it's my non-native ear; I find it difficult to extract the
incompatibility and to increase positive regard for either statement. Is
there supposed to be stress on 'experience' in the second one?

Dagmar sent a number of examples from radio conversations.  Some involve
concessions with elements uttered by different speakers. This raises the
general question of how well RST rel's map to dialogue.  For the
concession, it seems to be at least non-trivial, since we no longer have
the viewpoint of a single speaker who wishes to favour one proposition
at the expense of another.  One of the examples, however, is uttered by
the same speaker, and it uses just an "and".
X       CB:     for how long have you been in this business
        DV:     let's talk about you
X'      CB:     17 years
Y               ---> and you (can't get ready for a show don)
This seems indeed convincing to me.  Could occur in written language
just as well, I should think. Thanks for pointing it out!

Manfred