Discourse relation

A discourse relation (or rhetorical relation) is a description of how two segments of discourse are logically connected to one another.

One method of modeling discourse involves a set of concepts that constitute "segmented discourse representation theory" (SDRT).

SDRT

Asher and Lascarides categorize the discourse relations formalized in SDRT into five classes.

Metatalk relations

• Consequence*(α,β)^[1]
• Explanation*(α,β)^[1]
• Explanation*_q(α,β)^[1]
• Result*(α,β)^[1]

See also

• Speech act
• Contrast (linguistics)

Notes and references

1. Asher and Lascarides (2003): 333

Bibliography

• Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides (2003). Logics of Conversation. Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65058-5
• Pitler, Emily and others (2008). "Easily Identifiable Discourse Relations". University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-08-24.
• Grosz, Barbara J. and Candice L. Sidner (1986). "Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse". Computational Linguistics 12: 175–204. [aka DSM]
• Alistair Knott, 'An Algorithmic Framework for Specifying the Semantics of Discourse Relations', Computational Intelligence 16 (2000).
• Mann, William C. and Sandra A .Thompson (1988). "Rhetorical Structure Theory: A theory of text organization". Text 8: 243–281. [aka RST]

External links

• Rhetorical Structure Theory — RST website, created by William C. Mann, maintained by Maite Taboada