Abstract
Discourse segmentation is an important step in the process of annotating coherence relations. Ideally, implementing segmentation rules results in text segments that correspond to the units of thought related to each other. This paper demonstrates that accurate segmentation is in part dependent on the propositional content of text fragments, and that completely separating segmentation and annotation does not always yield text segments that correspond to the text units between which a conceptual relationship holds. In addition, it argues that elements belonging to the propositional content of the discourse should necessarily be included in the segmentation, but that inclusion of other text elements, for instance stance markers, should be optional.
Funding statement: This work was funded through the SNSF Sinergia project MODERN (CRSII2_147653).
References
Aijmer, Karin. 1997. I think – an English modal particle. In Toril Swan & Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), Modality in Germanic languages: Historical and comparative perspectives, 1–48. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110889932.1Search in Google Scholar
Asher, Nicholas & Alex Lascarides. 2005. Logics of conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 2006. Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5. 97–116.10.1016/j.jeap.2006.05.001Search in Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan. 1989. Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text 9(1). 93–124.10.1515/text.1.1989.9.1.93Search in Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The comment clause in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511551789Search in Google Scholar
Carlson, Lynn & Daniel Marcu. 2001. Discourse tagging reference manual. ISI technical report ISI-TR-545. doi:ftp://128.9.176.20/isi-pubs/tr-545.pdf (accessed 23 July 2014).Search in Google Scholar
Cartoni, Bruno, Sandrine Zufferey & Thomas Meyer. 2013. Using the Europarl corpus for cross-linguistic research. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 27(1). 23–42.10.1075/bjl.27.02carSearch in Google Scholar
Conrad, Susan & Douglas Biber. 2000. Adverbial marking of stance in speech and writing. In Geoff Thompson & Susan Hunston (eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse, 56–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cornillie, Bert. 2009. Evidentiality and epistemic modality: On the close relationship between wo different categories. Functions of Language 16(1). 44–62.10.1075/fol.16.1.04corSearch in Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara & Eve E. Sweetser. 2012. Viewpoint in language: A multimodal perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139084727Search in Google Scholar
Degand, Liesbeth. 1996. Causation in Dutch and French: Interpersonal aspects. In Ruqaiya Hasan, Carmel Cloran & David G. Butt (eds.), Functional descriptions: Theory in practice, 207–237. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/cilt.121.08degSearch in Google Scholar
Evers-Vermeul, Jacqueline. 2005. The development of Dutch connectives: Change and acquisition as windows on form-function relations. Utrecht University PhD thesis. Utrecht: LOT. http://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/110_fulltext.pdfSearch in Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita. 2014. I think, I mean and I believe in political discourse: Collocates, functions and distribution. Functions of Language 21(1). 67–94.10.1075/fol.21.1.05fetSearch in Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1993. English grammar: A function-based introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/z.engram1Search in Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. & Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London & New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Hobbs, Jerry R. 1979. Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science 3. 67–90.10.1207/s15516709cog0301_4Search in Google Scholar
Hobbs, Jerry R. 1990. Literature and cognition. Stanford: CSLI.Search in Google Scholar
Hunter, Julie. 2016. Reports in discourse. Dialogue and Discourse 7(4). 1–35.10.5087/dad.2016.401Search in Google Scholar
Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2009. Initial I think: Main or comment clause? Discourse and Interaction 2(1). 49–70.Search in Google Scholar
Kärkkäinen, Elise. 2003. Epistemic stance in English conversation. A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on ‘I think’. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.115Search in Google Scholar
Kehler, Andrew. 2002. Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford: CSLI.Search in Google Scholar
Kehler, Andrew, Laura Kertz, Hannah Rohde, & Jeffrey L. Elman. 2008. Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics25(1). 1–44.10.1093/jos/ffm018Search in Google Scholar PubMed
Koehn, Phillip. 2005. Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. Tenth Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit X). http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/pkoehn/publications/europarl-mtsummit05.pdf (accessed 8 April 2014).Search in Google Scholar
Mann, William C. & Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8(3). 243–281.10.1515/text.1.1988.8.3.243Search in Google Scholar
Matthiessen, Christian & Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. The structure of discourse and ‘subordination.’ In John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Clause combining and grammar in discourse, 275–329. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.18.12matSearch in Google Scholar
Pander Maat, Henk L. W. 2002. Tekstanalyse [text analysis]. Bussum: Coutinho.Search in Google Scholar
Pander Maat, Henk L. W. & Ted J. M. Sanders. 2000. Domains of use or subjectivity? The distribution of three Dutch causal connectives explained. Topics in English Linguistics 33. 57–82.10.1515/9783110219043.1.57Search in Google Scholar
Pareti, Sylvia. 2012. A database of attribution relations. Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). http://lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/index.html (accessed 18 December 2015).Search in Google Scholar
PDTB Research Group. 2007. The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 Annotation Manual. IRCS technical report. http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1203&context=ircs_reports (accessed 22 April 2014).Search in Google Scholar
Polanyi, Livia. 1988. A formal model of the structure of discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 12(5–6). 601–638.10.1016/0378-2166(88)90050-1Search in Google Scholar
Redeker, Gisela. 1990. Ideational and pragmatic markers of discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics 14(3). 367–381.10.1016/0378-2166(90)90095-USearch in Google Scholar
Reese, Brian, Julie Hunter, Nicholas Asher, Pascal Denis, & Jason Baldridge. 2007. Reference manual for the analysis of rhetorical structure. Unpublished manuscript. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin. http://timeml.org/jamesp/annotation_manual.pdf (accessed online 25 July 2014).Search in Google Scholar
Renkema, Jan. 2009. The texture of discourse: Towards an outline of connectivity theory. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.151Search in Google Scholar
Sanders, Ted J. M. 1997. Semantic and pragmatic sources of coherence: On the categorization of coherence relations in context. Discourse Processes 24(1). 119–147.10.1080/01638539709545009Search in Google Scholar
Sanders, José & Gisela Redeker. 1996. Speech and thought in narrative discourse. In Gilles Fauconnier & Eve E. Sweetser (eds.), Spaces, worlds and grammar, 290–317. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Sanders, Ted J. M., Wilbert P. M. S. Spooren, & Leo G. M. Noordman. 1992. Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes 15(1). 1–35.10.1080/01638539209544800Search in Google Scholar
Sanders, Ted J. M. & Carel H. van Wijk. 1996. PISA – A procedure for analyzing the structure of explanatory texts. Text 16(1). 91–132.10.1515/text.1.1996.16.1.91Search in Google Scholar
Schilperoord, Joost & Arie Verhagen 1998. Conceptual dependency and the clausal structure of discourse. In Jean-Pierre Koenig (ed.), Discourse and cognition: Bridging the gap, 141–163. Stanford: CSLI.Search in Google Scholar
Stukker, Ninke, Ted J. M. Sanders, & Arie Verhagen. 2008. Causality in verbs and in discourse connectives. Converging evidence of cross-level parallels in Dutch linguistic categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 40(7). 1296–1322.10.1016/j.pragma.2007.10.005Search in Google Scholar
Sweetser, Eve E. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics: The mind-body metaphor in semantic structure and semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511620904Search in Google Scholar
Taboada, Maite & William C. Mann. 2006. Rhetorical structure theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies 8(3). 423–459.10.1177/1461445606061881Search in Google Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A. 2002. “Object complements” and conversation: Towards a realistic account. Studies in Language 26(1). 125–163.10.1075/sl.26.1.05thoSearch in Google Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A. & Anthony Mulac. 1991. The discourse conditions for the use of the complementizer that in conversational English. Journal of Pragmatics 15(3). 237–251.10.1016/0378-2166(91)90012-MSearch in Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1995. Subjectification in grammaticalization. In Dieter Stein & Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation, 31–54. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1017/CBO9780511554469.003Search in Google Scholar
Tripadvisor review. 2009, August 31. Retrieved January 7, 2016, from http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g211878-d654059-r39310708-Cloisters_Bed_BreakfastKinsale_County_Cork.html.Search in Google Scholar
Verhagen, Arie. 2001. Subordination and discourse segmentation revisited, or: Why matrix clauses may be more dependent than complements. In Ted J. M. Sanders, Joost Schilperoord & Wilbert P. M. S. Spooren (eds.), Text representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects, 337–357. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.8.18verSearch in Google Scholar
Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Constructions of intersubjectivity: Discourse, syntax, and cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Versley, Yannick & Anna Gastel. 2013. Linguistic tests for discourse relations in the TüBa-D/Z corpus of written German. Dialogue and Discourse 4(2). 142–173.10.5087/dad.2013.207Search in Google Scholar
Wolf, Florian & Edward Gibson. 2005. Representing discourse coherence: A corpus-based study. Computational Linguistics 31(2). 249–287.10.1162/0891201054223977Search in Google Scholar
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
