{"title":"Explicitness and implicitness of discourse relations in a multilingual discourse bank","authors":"Amália Mendes, Deniz Zeyrek, G. Oleškevičienė","doi":"10.1075/fol.22011.men","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Proposals such as continuity and causality-by-default relate the level of expectedness of a relation to its\n linguistic marking as an explicit or implicit relation. We investigate these two proposals with regard to the English transcripts\n of six TED Talks and their Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish translations in the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank (TED-MDB),\n annotated for discourse relations, following the Penn Discourse Treebank style of annotation. Our data shows that the\n discontinuous relations contrast and concession are indeed frequently explicit in all languages. But continuous\n relations show differences per relation and language. For instance, cause is frequently conveyed implicitly in English\n and Portuguese, but not in Lithuanian and Turkish. We explore temporal continuity by analysing whether the forward-order sense\n result is more frequently implicit than the backward-order reason. The hypothesis is confirmed by English\n and Portuguese, but not Lithuanian and Turkish. However, in Turkish, the arguments of the backward-order relation reason\n are frequently presented by the reversed order of arguments, retaining the linear order of events even in the presence of the\n connective. The causality-by-default hypothesis is not confirmed, as cause is not the most frequent implicit relation in\n the four languages.","PeriodicalId":44232,"journal":{"name":"Functions of Language","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Functions of Language","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.22011.men","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
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.
期刊介绍:
Functions of Language is an international journal of linguistics which explores the functionalist perspective on the organisation and use of natural language. It encourages the interplay of theory and description, and provides space for the detailed analysis, qualitative or quantitative, of linguistic data from a broad range of languages. Its scope is broad, covering such matters as prosodic phenomena in phonology, the clause in its communicative context, and regularities of pragmatics, conversation and discourse, as well as the interaction between the various levels of analysis. The overall purpose is to contribute to our understanding of how the use of languages in speech and writing has impacted, and continues to impact, upon the structure of those languages.