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Article published In: 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. 67–91

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Explicitness and implicitness of discourse relations in a multilingual discourse bank

ORCiD logo with link | University of Lisbon
ORCiD logo with link | Middle East Technical University
ORCiD logo with link | Mykolas Romeris University
Published online: 31 January 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.22011.men
Abstract
Proposals such as continuity and causality-by-default relate the level of expectedness of a relation to its linguistic marking as an explicit or implicit relation. We investigate these two proposals with regard to the English transcripts of six TED Talks and their Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish translations in the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank (TED-MDB), annotated for discourse relations, following the Penn Discourse Treebank style of annotation. Our data shows that the discontinuous relations contrast and concession are indeed frequently explicit in all languages. But continuous relations show differences per relation and language. For instance, cause is frequently conveyed implicitly in English and Portuguese, but not in Lithuanian and Turkish. We explore temporal continuity by analysing whether the forward-order sense result is more frequently implicit than the backward-order reason. The hypothesis is confirmed by English and Portuguese, but not Lithuanian and Turkish. However, in Turkish, the arguments of the backward-order relation reason are frequently presented by the reversed order of arguments, retaining the linear order of events even in the presence of the connective. The causality-by-default hypothesis is not confirmed, as cause is not the most frequent implicit relation in the four languages.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Continuity, causality-by-default and cognitive complexity
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Research questions and discussion of results
    • 4.1Research questions and hypotheses
    • 4.2Results for the continuity hypothesis
      • 4.2.1Overall analysis of continuous and discontinuous senses
      • 4.2.2Analysis of second-level senses
        • Continuous senses
        • Discontinuous senses
    • 4.3Results for temporal continuity
    • 4.4Results for the causality-by-default hypothesis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (34)
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