ESSLLI 2008
K. Jasinskaja
H. Zeevat

General info
Description
Syllabus

• session 1
• sessions 2 and 3
• session 4
• session 5

Rhetorical Relations

General information:

Course description:

Rhetorical relations (RR) hold between sentences and clauses in a coherent discourse and may reflect the contentful relations between events or situations described (e.g. cause, temporal succession), or the presentational strategy pursued by the speaker in order to produce a certain effect on the hearer (e.g. contrast, evidence). RR can be encoded explicitly in the text by special linguistic means (discourse particles, intonation) or remain implicit, in which case they are inferred by the hearer on the basis of general pragmatic considerations. The interaction between the linguistic processes and the general inference mechanisms involved in establishing RR, as well as the formal modelling of this interaction is a relevant issue of cross-linguistic research between language and logic. The course will introduce students to the phenomenon of RR in written and spoken language and discuss the major formal approaches to their inference (Abduction, SDRT) culminating in a recent reduction of RR to general pragmatics, using ideas from Optimality Theory.

Syllabus:

session 1: Introduction. Discourse coherence. Rhetorical relations as a classification of coherent textual connections. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Applications of RST. Linguistic markers of RR. Linguistic and cognitive motivation for RR.

• [slides full screen] [slides 4up]
• The RST Website
• Knott & Sanders (1998). The Classification of Coherence Relations and Their Linguistic Markers: An Exploration of Two Languages. Journal of Pragmatics, 30: 135-175. [Full text via ScienceDirect]

sessions 2 and 3: Rhetorical relations from a linguist's perspective. Linguistic effects of RR. Lascarides and Asher (1993): Tense. Kehler (2002): VP ellipsis, Gapping; Pronoun Resolution.

• [slides full screen] [slides 4up]
• Lascarides & Asher (1993). Temporal Interpretation, Discourse Relations and Commonsense Entailment. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16: 437-493
• Kehler (2002). Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar.
• Kehler, Kertz, Rohde & Elman (2008). Coherence and Coreference Revisited. Journal of Semantics, 25(1): 1-44. [Abstract with link to full text]
• Hendriks (2004). Coherence Relations, Ellipsis and Contrastive Topics. Journal of Semantics, 21: 133-153

session 4: Marked and unmarked rhetorical relations. Inference of unmarked RR. Abduction. Default logic

• [slides full screen]
• Hobbs (1985). On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse. Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.
• Lascarides & Asher (1993). Temporal Interpretation, Discourse Relations and Commonsense Entailment. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16: 437-493
• Asher & Lascarides (2003). Logics of Conversation.

session 5: Explaining relative markedness of RR. RR in Optimality Theory and related approaches

• [slides full screen]
• Zeevat (2008). Discourse Structure in Optimality Theoretic Pragmatics. To appear in: Sidner, Harpur, Benz & Kühnlein. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Constraints in Discourse. [Draft]
• Jasinskaja (2008). Modelling Discourse Relations by Topics and Implicatures: The Elaboration Default. To appear in: Sidner, Harpur, Benz & Kühnlein. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Constraints in Discourse. [Draft]