[RSTLIST] antithesis or contrast

[William Mann]

Hi, all.

Responding to the comment from Manfred Stede:

I find Manfred's comment surprising.

The RST Contrast relation was intended to represent cases in which the
writer was not expressing a preference or identification with one of two
differing alternatives. I have presumed that these cases come up eventually
in every genre, and that a general relation of Contrast is therefore an
efficient way to deal with them.

My surprise is with the statement that such cases never come up in newspaper
commentaries, so that Contrast can be ruled out a priori.

The example that Juliano Desiderato Antonio gave sounded like Contrast to
me. The writer does not seem to identify either with the cautious father or
the young lover.  I have been in both of those roles, and I sympathize with
both.  Equally. So (irrelevant to RST)  I have no automatic asymmetry
either.  For RST, it is only the analyst's judgment about what is expressed
by the writer that counts.

Enough.  I will look forward to other comments.

Bill Mann



----- Original Message -----
From: "Manfred Stede" <stede at LING.UNI-POTSDAM.DE>
To: <RSTLIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 8:39 AM
Subject: Re: [RST-LIST] [RSTLIST] antithesis or contrast


Hi,

we've worked with newspaper commentaries for a while, and resolved the
antithesis/contrast question -- for this particular genre, at least --
to the effect that contrast is more or less ruled out. Reason: whenever
these things appear in a context, one of the spans is going to be the
more important one, the positively regarded one, or the one that's going
to be further elaborated. Hence, we need to assign nuclearity to one of
the spans, and hence we have antitheses all over the place. Seems to me
you have a similar situation in your example. Judging from the English
translation, how about an antithesis between 2 and 3, 4 consequence of
3, and the whole 2-4 elaborating 1?

(also, I have some principal doubts about the status of CONTRAST as a
rhetorical relation, but that's a different story..)

regards,
Manfred Stede



Juliano Desiderato Antonio wrote:
>
> I'm in doubt about the most appropriate relation for situations like the
> example below from a Brazilian Portuguese oral narrative. First I thought
> that the antithesis relation could apply here between text spans 1-2 and
3-
> 4, because there's some positive regard for one of the situations.
However,
> as the text type is a monologue narrative and the speaker is involved with
> the subject matter, I thought that the contrast situation would be better.
> What do you think? The corpus I'm studying is formed by 60 narratives and
> examples like these are in all of them.
>
> 1 ele encontra uma moça, [he meets a girl]
> 2 .. e se apaixona por ela, [and he falls in love with her]
> 3 ... só que o pai dela é muito ruim, [but her father is bery mean]
> 4 e não quer de jeito nenhum o namoro deles. [and he doesn't want them to
> date]
>
> Thanks,
>
> Juliano