[Rstlist] Restatement and Summary

[Eduard Hovy]

> On Aug 31, 2017, at 10:34 AM, Potter, Andrew Nelson <apotter1 at una.edu> wrote:
> On the RST Web site, the Restatement and Summary relations are identified as Presentational relations.  In earlier Mann and Thompson (1988), they are identified as Subject Matter Relations.  Having given this some thought, I can see how a case could be made for this, i.e. that the reader’s ability to comprehend the nucleus is increased.  But I have some concerns about that interpretation.  I wonder if anyone recalls previous discussion of this, and if so, what the upshot may have been.


I used to work with RST relations a long time ago (Bill Mann was my first boss, and it was a joy to learn from him).  It is interesting to come back to the topic in my geriatric age :-) and see what things look like to me now. 

I used to believe that I understood the difference between Presentational and SubjectMatter relations; roughly, I thought, the former was Textual as (in Halliday’s Metafunctions) and the latter, Ideational and/or Interpersonal.  But looking at the lists on 
  http://www.sfu.ca/rst/01intro/definitions.html <http://www.sfu.ca/rst/01intro/definitions.html> 
I find it harder than I used to to cleanly make the distinction and, in fact, to define these notions.  

One might argue that Presentational ones do not add in the Satellite any (or significant) novel content to what’s in the Nucleus, they just refine or reformulate or compress it.  But Antithesis and Concession do not fit this definition (because they provide significantly differentiating info), and Enablement and Motivation also not (because they give info or reasons for the Reader to act/read), and even Justify is questionable (because it says why the Writer is choosing to say the Nucleus).  So Contrast would group with Antithesis and Concession (in that it provides additional info that’s differentiated along some dimension(s) of interest), but it is a SubjectMatter relation.  So is Evaluation, which provides the Writer’s opinion judgement, which is at least implicit in Motivation and perhaps Justify (both the latter imply some sort of valuation by the Writer).  

In a paper Elisabeth Maier wrote around 1991, we collected some 400 relations from about 30 sources, grouped them by approximate identity/equivalence, and proposed that we used those instead, since they slightly extended the RST set and immediately linked to other related work at the time (see attached).  We placed Summary as a type of Restatement as a type of Elaboration.  

In geriatricity, I find that paper hard to read in places as well.  I think the lesson is: go with your initial enthusiasm and don’t get old.  What seems simple at first just gets more complex.  

Regards, 
E




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