Description
This masterclass focuses on coherence relations in discourse. By coherence relations we understand those between propositions, within and across sentences, referred to as coherence relations, discourse relations, or rhetorical relations. They are paratactic (coordinate) or hypotactic (subordinate) relations that hold across two or more text spans, such as Elaboration, Condition, Concession, Antithesis or Summary. Coherence relations have been proposed as an explanation for the construction of coherence in discourse.
Topics of particular interest in this course will be:
- Cognitive validity of coherence relations. Are they cognitive entities or not?
- Signalling of relations in discourse. Types of signals and status of ‘unsignalled’ or implicit relations
- Corpus studies, within and across genres and languages
- Computational applications (in information extraction, summarization, essay scoring, sentiment analysis)
Reading list
- Taboada, Maite and William C. Mann (2006) Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies, 8 (3): 423-459.
- Taboada, Maite (2009) Implicit and explicit coherence relations. In J. Renkema (Ed.), Discourse, of Course (pp. 127-140). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Spooren, Wilbert and Ted Sanders (2008) The acquisition order of coherence relations: On cognitive complexity in discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40 (12): 2003-2026.
- Webber, Bonnie and Aravind K Joshi (2012) Discourse structure: Past, present and future, Proceedings of the ACL 2012 Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries (pp. 42-54). Jeju, Korea.
Schedule
Monday, January 7
- General introduction by Maite Taboada
- Short (5 minute) presentation by the students on their topics
Tuesday, January 8
- Student presentations:
- Marta Andersson
- Nynke van Vliet
- Bram Vertommen
Wednesday, January 9
- Student presentations:
- Matthias Passer
- Andres Karjus
- Discussion and summary
(No class January 10 or 11)
Guidelines for student presentations
- Approximately 30 minute presentation of the thesis topic, and how it relates to coherence relations
- 10 minutes of discussion after the presentation
- On the first day, you will be asked to make a brief introduction to your topic. At that time, also come prepared with some questions you have about your topic at this point, and how you think this masterclass will help you answer them.