coherence relations between large spans of text

[Michael O'Donnell]

Hi Anna,

 My personal belief is that it is a mistake to  try to structure
entire texts just  in terms of coherence relations (or rhetorical
relations), except for smaller texts.

Larger texts often also reflect a degree of top-down schematic structure,
e.g., for an essay, we have the overly simplistic introduction^body^conclusions,
(with different schemas proposed for the introduction at least). For stories,
Labov proposed a schema consisting of:

            Orientation^Complication^Resolution(^Coda)

In this approach, there is no one nucleus to which other elements
are optional satellites. Rather, we have a multi-nuclear structure, where each
structural component has its part ot play in the whole.

RST includes multi-nuclear relations, although they are generally
more generic (e.g., sequence, joint, etc.)

Mick


On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 8:18 PM, Anna Kazantseva
<ankazant at site.uottawa.ca> wrote:
> Dear list members,
>
> I  a Ph.D. student at the University of Ottawa, working on coherence of
> short stories (classical fiction) from the perspective of Computational
> Linguistics. I wonder if any of you are aware of any papers/books/other
> pointers about what sort of coherence relations can hold between relatively
> large segments of text, either in RST or in another tradition.
>
> I know that RST does not make a distiction between large and small spans  of
> text.  But  it seems to be the case (looking  at Discourse TreeBank) that
> people agree less and less on specific coherence relations and even on the
> shape of the tree the higher up the tree they work and the larger text spans
> get.  With fiction this is a real problem because texts are relatively
> large. I am looking for alternative ways to represent coherence between
> large segments of text (paragraphs and  larger),  but so far with little luck.
> Thank you in advance for any pointer. I will post a summary of the responses
> I get.
> Regards,
>
> Anna Kazantseva
>
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