Table Of ContentConstraints in Discourse 3
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Volume 223
Constraints in Discourse 3. Representing and inferring discourse structure
Edited by Anton Benz, Manfred Stede and Peter Kühnlein
Constraints in Discourse 3
Representing and inferring discourse structure
Edited by
Anton Benz
Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin
Manfred Stede
University of Potsdam
Peter Kühnlein
Free researcher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Constraints in discourse 3 : representing and inferring discourse structure /
edited by Anton Benz, Manfred Stede, and Peter Kühnlein.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 223)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Discourse analysis. 2. Constraints (Linguistics) I. Benz, Anton, 1965- II. Stede,
Manfred, 1965- III. Kühnlein, Peter. IV. Title: Constraints in discourse three.
P302.28.C68 2012
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Anton Benz & Manfred Stede
Processing narrative texts: Melting frozen time? 17
Berry Claus
Through narrative planning towards the preverbal message:
A DRT-based approach 45
Katja Jasinskaja & Antje Roßdeutscher
Bridges between events: Frame semantics and indirect anaphora 77
Matthias Irmer
The semantics of French continuative rises in SDRT 109
Jacques Jayez & Mathilde Dargnat
Coherence structure and lexical cohesion in expository
and persuasive texts 137
Ildikó Berzlánovich, Markus Eg g & Gisela Redeker
Complex connectives in German: Complications for local
coherence analysis 165
Manfred Stede & Kristin Irsig
Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish:
A corpus-based analysis of Fakat, Yoksa, Ayrıca 183
Deniz Zeyrek, Ümit Deniz Turan, Işın Demirşahin &
Ruket Çakıcı
Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English:
An information-packaging approach 207
Rudy Loock
Index 227
Acknowledgements
The contributions to this book are based on a selection of the proceedings of the
third conference on constraints in discourse held in 2008 at the University of
Potsdam. All chapters have been peer reviewed and thoroughly revised. The con-
ference was organised by Anton Benz, Manfred Stede, and Peter Kühnlein.
We have to thank the University of Potsdam for letting us use the wonder-
fully located lecture halls at the Neues Palais near Sanssouci palace, Potsdam. We
also thank the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) and the collaborative research
centre (SFB 632) on Information Structure for their financial support.
The work of Anton Benz was supported by funding from the German Ministry
for Education and Research (BMBF), grant number 01UG0711. Although work on
this volume was partly supported by a BMBF grant, the authors alone are respon-
sible for the contents of this work.
As for the previous volumes in the constraints in discourse series, we have
to thank our student assistants for preparing the index. Our special thanks go to
Anita Fetzer, the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series’ editor, and to Isja Conen from
John Benjamins’ publishing company for their advice and support.
Introduction
Anton Benz & Manfred Stede
Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin / University of Potsdam
Discourse analysis is a sub-field of linguistics which can be approached from
many different directions, involving a large variety of different methods. In most
of the work reported in this book, discourse refers to written monologue. For
the purposes of this introduction, we thus largely concentrate on text and use
the terms discourse and text interchangeably. Specifically, this volume collects
psycholinguistic studies, investigations of logical and computational models of
discourse, corpus studies, and linguistic case studies of language-specific devices.
However, this variety of approaches only reflects the complexity of discourse
production and understanding, and the necessity of understanding the interplay
of diverse parameters in these processes.
1. Levels of analysis: Coreference and coherence relations
It is a linguistic commonplace to say that the meaning of text is more than the
conjunction of the meaning of its sentences. Different factors can be named which
make discourse a whole. The literature on discourse analysis distinguishes here
between cohesion and coherence. Cohesion is produced for example by anaphoric
elements as pronouns, definite descriptions, and tense. They are anaphoric in the
sense that some meaning component refers to the previous text. For example, in
(1a), the second sentence can only be interpreted after reading the first sentence
due to the presence of the pronoun he. If the order of the sentences is reversed as
in (1b), the text is not a complete whole any more.
(1) a. A man walked into the room. He was wearing a black jacket.
b. He was wearing a black jacket. A man walked into the room.
This example also demonstrates that the temporal location of events depends on
the order of the sentences in which they are reported. In (1a), the state described in
the second sentence overlaps with the event reported in the first sentence. Hence,
also the temporal location of events and states depends on the foregoing text.
Coherence, in contrast to cohesion, denotes the functional connectedness
of discourse. For the functional connectedness, the rhetorical structure which is
2 Anton Benz & Manfred Stede
induced by rhetorical relations between text spans plays a prominent role (Hobbs
1985; Mann & Thompson 1988; Knott & Sanders 1998; Asher & Lascarides 2003).
For example, the second sentence in (1a) further describes a piece of clothes
which the person introduced in the first sentence is wearing. In this sense, it
can be said that it is connected with an elaboration relation to the first sentence.
With (Mann & Thompson 1988), this relation can be represented graphically as
follows:
(2)
Elaboration
A man walked He was wearing
into the room a black jacket
However, functional coherence and anaphoric cohesion of discourse are not inde-
pendent. In fact, it has always been a major issue in the research on rhetorical
relations how they constrain the anaphoric accessibility of discourse old material.
In (3a) the man introduced in the first sentence is accessible to the pronoun in the
third sentence. In (3b) the man is not accessible, and the discourse becomes odd.
(3) a. A man walked into the room. The door swung wide open. He was
wearing a black jacket.
b. A man walked into the room. Mary woke up and fumbled for her keys.
He was wearing a black jacket.
The first theory that considered accessibility conditions beyond sentence level in
a formally precise framework was the Discourse Representation Theory (DRT);
see especially (Kamp & Reyle 1993). In DRT, accessibility depends on the logical
form of sentences. It explains why, for example, the following uses of pronouns are
infelicitous:
(4) a. In the cage there was no lion. *It was snoring and sleeping.
b. If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it. *He is my neighbour.
Discourse is interpreted incrementally by constructing Discourse Representation
Structures (DRSs). A DRS consists of a pair 〈U, Con〉 of a discourse universe U and
discourse constraints Con. The universe U contains discourse referents, which cor-
respond to the familiar variables of first-order logic. U represents the set of entities
introduced by the discourse. The discourse constraints in Con are, in the most
simple case, a set of first-order formulas that represent the truth conditionally rel-
evant content of the discourse. A DRS representing the sentence ‘It was snoring
