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Continuative and contrastive discourse relations across discourse domains: Cognitive and cross-linguistic approaches
Edited by Matthias Klumm, Anita Fetzer and Evelien Keizer
[Functions of Language 30:1] 2023
► pp. 41–66

Continuity in discourse relations

ORCID logo | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
ORCID logo | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Continuity and discontinuity (maintaining or shifting deictic centres across segments) are important aspects of discourse relations. Yet they have been attributed to these relations in very different ways. This calls for an analysis of individual instances of discourse relations with respect to their continuity dimensions. To this end, we operationalise Givón’s (1993) continuity dimensions (time, space, reference, action, perspective, modality, and speech act), decomposing them into distinctive features that allow a consistent and accurate classification of the continuity dimensions in discourse relation tokens. This inventory was applied to five representative relation types (causal, contrastive, conditional, elaboration, and temporal) from the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson & Marcu 2001). We found that relations can simultaneously be more continuous for some dimensions but more discontinuous for others. What is more, discourse relations typically vary widely in different continuity dimensions and thus cannot be described as fully continuous or discontinuous, neither on the level of the entire relation type nor for one of its particular dimensions. Using examples of causal, conditional, and contrastive relations, we also illustrate how the results of our analysis can be used to verify hypotheses about correlations between continuity and discourse relations.
Keywords: discourse relations, continuity, Rhetorical Structure Theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1The notion of continuity
    • 2.2Discourse relations
    • 2.3Continuity in discourse relations
  • 3.Operationalisation of continuity dimensions
    • 3.1Time
    • 3.2Space
    • 3.3Reference
    • 3.4Action
    • 3.5Perspective
    • 3.6Modality
    • 3.7Speech act
  • 4.A corpus analysis of discourse relations
    • 4.1The discourse continuity corpus
    • 4.2Annotation and inter-rater agreement
    • 4.3Results on continuity in discourse relations
    • 4.4Evaluation of our results
    • 4.5Hypotheses on continuity dimensions and discourse relations
  • 5.Conclusions and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 31 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.22017.das
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