Discourse relation

A discourse relation (or rhetorical relation) is a description of how two segments of discourse are logically and/or structurally connected to one another. It is widely accepted that coherence in text is established through text relations that constitute paratactic (coordinate) or hypotactic (subordinate) relations that hold across two or more text spans.^[1]

Selected theories and annotation frameworks of discourse relations include:

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that uses rhetorical relations as a systematic way for an analyst to analyse the text. An analysis is usually built by reading the text and constructing a tree using the relations.
Segmented discourse representation theory" (SDRT)

SDRT[]

Asher and Lascarides categorize the discourse relations formalized in SDRT into five classes.

Content-level relations[]

Text structuring relations[]

Divergent relations[]

Metatalk relations[]

Consequence*(α,β)^[2]
Explanation*(α,β)^[2]
Explanation*_q(α,β)^[2]
Result*(α,β)^[2]

Notes and references[]

^ Taboada, Maite (2009). "Implicit and explicit coherence relations" (PDF). In Renkema, Jan (ed.). Discourse, of course: an overview of research in discourse studies. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 127–140. doi:10.1075/z.148.13tab. ISBN 9789027232588. OCLC 276996573.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Asher and Lascarides (2003): 333

Bibliography[]

and (2003). Logics of Conversation. Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65058-5
Pitler, Emily and others (2008). "Easily Identifiable Discourse Relations". University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-08-24.
Grosz, Barbara J. and Candice L. Sidner (1986). "Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse". Computational Linguistics 12: 175–204. [aka DSM]
Alistair Knott, 'An Algorithmic Framework for Specifying the Semantics of Discourse Relations', Computational Intelligence 16 (2000).
Mann, William C. and Sandra A .Thompson (1988). "Rhetorical Structure Theory: A theory of text organization". Text 8: 243–281. [aka RST]

External links[]

Rhetorical Structure Theory — RST website, created by William C. Mann, maintained by

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[1] Taboada, Maite (2009). "Implicit and explicit coherence relations" (PDF). In Renkema, Jan (ed.). Discourse, of course: an overview of research in discourse studies. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 127–140. doi:10.1075/z.148.13tab. ISBN 9789027232588. OCLC 276996573.

[AL03-333-2] Asher and Lascarides (2003): 333

[1]

[2]