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Article published In:
Anglo-German Discourse Crossings and Contrasts
Edited by Sylvia Jaworska and Torsten Leuschner
[Pragmatics and Society 9:1] 2018
► pp. 26–51

“Well would you believe it, I have failed the exam again”

Discourse relations in English and German personal narratives

| University of Saarbrücken
| University of Augsburg

This paper compares the linguistic realization of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations in English and German short personal narratives, paying particular attention to the context-dependence of (1) their overt marking with discourse connectives, and (2) their adjacent and non-adjacent positioning. The analysis is based on 20 written texts collected from university students.

The use of discourse connectives with adjacently and non-adjacently positioned discourse relations is more frequent in the English data. Considering the sentence as the unit of investigation, the coordinating relations of Contrast and Result and the subordinating relation of Explanation are marked overtly throughout the English data, while coordinating Narration and Background, and subordinating Elaboration and Comment relations are marked overtly less frequently. The picture is roughly similar with clauses as units of investigation. In the German data, the use of discourse connectives is also more frequent irrespective of adjacently or non-adjacently positioned discourse relations.

Keywords: discourse relation, adjacency, discourse connective, context, personal narrative, granularity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse: Quantity meets quality
  • 3.Personal narratives
  • 4.Discourse relations in contrast
    • 4.1Discourse relations in the German data
    • 4.2Discourse relations in the English data
    • 4.3Contrastive analysis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.16024.spe
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Fetzer, Anita
2018. The encoding and signalling of discourse relations in argumentative discourse. In The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 296], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Fetzer, Anita & Augustin Speyer
2019. Discourse relations across genres and contexts. Languages in Contrast 19:2 ► pp. 205 ff. DOI logo

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