In this chapter, we start by defining and illustrating the notions of discourse relations and connectives. We will see that even though the role of discourse connectives is to make discourse relations explicit in discourse, their use is not necessary for a discourse relation to be communicated. Conversely, connectives are not always associated with a specific discourse relation: many of them can convey various relations depending on the context. Another goal of this chapter is to situate discourse relations and connectives within the more general concepts of discourse cohesion and coherence. We will see that connectives represent one type of cohesive tie and that discourse relations are crucial elements ensuring local coherence within a discourse. In the last part of the chapter, we present some important underlying methodological and theoretical choices that were made when selecting the topics covered in the book and the data presented in each chapter. We also emphasize that the study of discourse connectives and relations has many interfaces with other domains of linguistic analysis such as semantics, pragmatics and syntax.

In this chapter, our main objective is to provide a succinct description of four leading models of discourse: Rhetorical Structure Theory, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the Penn Discourse Treebank project, and the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations. We present the main goals of each model, and discuss their advantages and limitations. We also list their specificities compared to other models, and analyze the main differences between them. We focus more specifically on the aspects of these models that have to do with the description of discourse relations. For each model, we present the type of research to which it has been applied, and the data that have been produced in the form of annotated corpora. As we will see, all these models have been used to annotate large corpora with discourse relations. An important issue is therefore to establish mappings between the relations annotated in each of them, in order to compare data from one corpus to the others. At the end the chapter, we discuss various options for comparing annotations across models.

This chapter deals with two innovative devices, the verb-copying construction and verb reduplication. The verb-copying construction was innovated approximately 300 years ago and is a relatively young construction that did not have any equivalent before the fifteenth century AD. Unlike the disposal construction, which is marked by a grammatical morpheme bǎ, the verb-copying construction represented an abstract syntactic structure without any specific lexical marking. The reduplication of nouns emerged around the third century BC and was taken over by classifiers after the sixth century AD, while a number of classifiers grammaticalized out of ordinary nouns. However, the reduplication of verbs did not exist until the thirteenth century AD, more than two millennia later than the reduplication of adjectives and adverbs.

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

This chapter focuses on the role that discourse relations and structure play in a variety of phenomena of interest to semanticists and philosophers. Not only do discourse relations add semantic content above and beyond the individual propositions expressed by the utterances in a discourse, but they, and the complex structures to which they give rise, can influence the interpretations of individual utterances, having an effect on the very propositions the utterances are understood to express. In this chapter, we look in detail at how theories of discourse structure can be brought to bear on at-issue and non-at-issue content, using appositive relative clauses and discourse parenthetical reports as illustrations. We also discuss recent efforts to use discourse structure to model conversational goals and capture the subjective nature of discourse interpretation as well as recent work extending theories of discourse structure to multimodal discourse. Along the way, we emphasize the importance of corpus work in studying discursive phenomena and raise a series of large questions to be pursued in future work.

Chapter 14: Building Awareness of Discourse Structure. Skilled readers are tuned into how information is organized, how central themes emerge, and how signaling mechanisms provide cues to this organization. Skilled readers are able to identify the main or topic sentences as they appear in a text and are sensitive to text structures that help identify where to find main idea sentences. The chapter sorts written discourse analysis into two distinct approaches. The first examined specific aspects of the texts themselves, describing the roles of cohesion, information structuring, lexical signaling, anaphoric signaling, topic continuity signaling, text coherence, text genres, and patterns of discourse organization that underlie all prose texts. The second approach involves a focus on intentional inferencing skills and “deep comprehension.” The chapter then reviews research on discourse structure and reading comprehension in both L1 and L2 contexts. It also focuses specifically on the importance of using discourse sensitive graphic organizers. The chapter then describes research on teaching discourse structure awareness, and concludes with implications for instruction.

The primary goal of this chapter is to present the state of the art on Chinese intonation research, with a focus on how tone and intonation interact. To this end, the general functions and forms of intonation observed in (Mandarin) Chinese are first introduced. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the multiplexing of the f0 channel for tone and intonation in varieties of Chinese as well as the different proposals posited for intonation modeling. The secondary goal of this chapter is to highlight open issues and suggest potential points for future research on intonation in Chinese.