Two fundamental components of causality are the Cause and the Result. In linguistic work the distinction between these aspects is commonly blurred, presumably because the primary research focus has been on describing how language encodes causality. The semantic nature of the component events and the constraints on their relationship are seldom discussed; however, the current work aims to shed light on a broader spectrum of features that underlie the concept. This is an essential foundation for understanding how language communicates Result. The present discussion explores and illuminates the nature of this concept focusing on a relatively open-ended set of linguistic elements that can play a role in shaping a discourse relation in addition to discourse connectives. This is in contrast to the majority of the previous research, which has been quite intensely concerned with investigating a limited collection of well-established causality markers. Also, despite the fact that English has been used in studies on causality both as a control language and a metalanguage, there is surprisingly little work on the semantics of the relations that occur specifically in English, let alone Result relations. By borrowing from several cognitively-oriented approaches and combining empirical data from two written corpora (British National Corpus and the Penn Discourse Treebank) with experimental work, the current study systematically investigates the conceptual and linguistic properties of several closely related Result relation types (including Purpose), along with the joint role of discourse connectives and other discourse elements in conveying the intended sense. The findings indicate that linguistic signals of the conceptual structure of the relation seem to play a more significant role in the interpretation than explicit marking. Two factors emerged as more vital cues than the presence of the ambiguous connective so.  In Purpose relations, a modal auxiliary conveying an intended effect, and in Result relations the presence/absence of an intentionally acting actor are crucial for disambiguation. The multifunctional connective therefore seems to merely satisfy the mandatory marking requirement related to the intrinsically unrealized (‘nonveridical’) nature of Purpose. In Result the presence of an ambiguous marker is to a great extent optional in English. However, discourse markers can also reflect how language users categorize causal event types. This claim has been confirmed in several cross-linguistic analyses, but the lexicon of English connectives has not been systematically investigated from this vantage point. The few existing studies found that the uses of English connectives are quite unconstrained across causal categories. The present work contributes to this line of research and suggests that two unambiguous markers, as a result and for this reason, indeed cover a wide range of causal event types; however, they also exhibit significant tendencies to occur prototypically in certain relation types. The presence and role of an intentionally acting discourse participant behind both real-world and linguistic causally-related events contributes to these tendencies. The contexts that include such a participant are regarded as intrinsically subjective and have been found to manifest surface expressions of subjectivity in previous work on other languages. The current study confirms similar tendencies in the linguistic construal and marking of Result relations in English, which proves that certain language elements partake in establishing the intended interpretation on a par with discourse connectives.  What emerges as a result of this discussion, is therefore an account on how English utilizes the broad category of Result and what linguistic elements are used to convey the array of resultative events.

This thesis considers the automatic acquisition of knowledge about discourse connectives. It focuses in particular on their semantic properties, and on the relationships that hold between them. There is a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work on discourse connectives. For example, Knott (1996) motivates a taxonomy of discourse connectives based on relationships between them, such as HYPONYMY and EXCLUSIVE, which are defined in terms of substitution tests. Such work requires either great theoretical insight or manual analysis of large quantities of data. As a result, to date no manual classification of English discourse connectives has achieved complete coverage. For example, Knott gives relationships between only about 18% of pairs obtained from a list of 350 discourse connectives. This thesis explores the possibility of classifying discourse connectives automatically, based on their distributions in texts. This thesis demonstrates that state-of-the-art techniques in lexical acquisition can successfully be applied to acquiring information about discourse connectives. Central to this thesis is the hypothesis that distributional similarity correlates positively with semantic similarity. Support for this hypothesis has previously been found for word classes such as nouns and verbs (Miller and Charles, 1991; Resnik and Diab, 2000, for example), but there has been little exploration of the degree to which it also holds for discourse connectives. We investigate the hypothesis through a number of machine learning experiments. These experiments all use unsupervised learning techniques, in the sense that they do not require any manually annotated data, although they do make use of an automatic parser. First, we show that a range of semantic properties of discourse connectives, such as polarity and veridicality (whether or not the semantics of a connective involves some underlying negation, and whether the connective implies the truth of its arguments, respectively), can be acquired automatically with a high degree of accuracy. Second, we consider the tasks of predicting the similarity and substitutability of pairs of discourse connectives. To assist in this, we introduce a novel information theoretic function based on variance that, in combination with distributional similarity, is useful for learning such relationships. Third, we attempt to automatically construct taxonomies of discourse connectives capturing substitutability relationships. We introduce a probability model of taxonomies, and show that this can improve accuracy on learning substitutability relationships. Finally, we develop an algorithm for automatically constructing or extending such taxonomies which uses beam search to help find the optimal taxonomy.

Discourse connectives signal discourse coherence by making discourse relations explicit and by playing a role in the organization and structure of information in discourse. Therefore, their use in L2 writing is an important field of study that is likely to have implications for discourse competence both at the sentence-level discourse and at the level of larger discourse structure. The aim of the present study is to account for the use of three contrastive discourse connectives, but, however and although at both the microstructural and the macrostructural levels of discourse in the argumentative essays written by Turkish learners of English and native speakers of American English. The patterns of use by L2 learners are compared with those of native speakers. The analysis is based on 120 essays from two corpora: Turkish subcorpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (TICLE) and American subcorpus of Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (ALOCNESS). The study reveals that the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English and American students do not differ significantly regarding the three connectives neither structurally nor semantically. However, at the macrostructural level of discourse, differences concerning the pattern of argumentation and the role that the connectives play in the claim-counterargument-refutation pattern of organization were observed. Further analysis on other lexical items used in argumentation shows that in ALOCNESS, there is more reliance on other means, such as the lexical items expressing modality and those signaling the argumentative nature of the text.

This doctoral thesis is devoted to linguistic analysis of discourse relations as one of the aspects of discourse coherence. Discourse relations are semantic relations holding between propositions in a discourse (discourse arguments). The aim of the thesis is a complex description of discourse relations in Czech and its application in an annotation scheme in the Prague Dependency Treebank. The thesis is divided into three parts: The first one is focused on the theoretical description of discourse relations and on analysis of adequacy of various methodological concepts in corpus processing. The second part describes in detail the proposed scheme for the annotation of discourse relations and the process of the corpus build- up including the evaluation of consistency of the annotated data. Finally, in the last part of the thesis, we address some problematic issues arisen with the employment the proposed scheme and look for their possible solutions.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第22900号 / 人博第969号 / 新制||人||229(附属図書館) / 2020||人博||969(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 谷口 一美, 教授 藤田 耕司, 准教授 守田 貴弘, 教授 山梨 正明 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

The paper concentrates on which language means may be included into the annotation of discourse relations in the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) and tries to examine the so called alternative lexicalizations of discourse markers (AltLex's) in Czech. The analysis proceeds from the annotated data of PDT and tries to draw a comparison between the Czech AltLex's from PDT and English AltLex's from PDTB (the Penn Discourse Treebank). The paper presents the lexico-syntactic and semantic characterization of the Czech AltLex's and comments on the current stage of their annotation in PDT. In the current version, PDT contains 306 expressions (out of the total 43,955 of sentences) that were labeled by annotators as being an AltLex. However, as the analysis demonstrates, this number is not final. We suppose that it will increase after the further elaboration, as AltLex's are not restricted to a limited set of syntactic classes and some of them exhibit a great degree of variation.

Magdaléna Rysová Discourse Connectives in Czech (From Centre to Periphery) Abstract The thesis focuses on description and analysis of discourse connectives in Czech in broader sense, i.e. by which language means it is possible to express sense relation within a text. The thesis is not limited to any parts of speech (like conjunctions or structuring particles) but it tries to find and describe all language means in Czech with the ability to connect two pieces or units of a text into one coherent complex. The thesis investigates discourse connectives in Czech with respect to the so called secondary connectives (i.e. mainly multiword phrases like to je důvod, proč - that is the reason why; kvůli těmto skutečnostem - due to these facts etc., in opposition to primary connectives like však - however, nebo - or, a - and, ale - but, proto - therefore etc.). Discourse connectives are (in general terms) understood as language expressions that signal semantico-pragmatic relations within a text. However, there are many theories that significantly differ in the concrete description of these expressions. Therefore, there is not a generally accepted and universal definition of discourse connectives and their description and characteristics is still a matter of linguistic discussion. The aim of this thesis is to contribute...

This thesis deals with discourse relations as a parameter of style. Two sets of text samples were analysed, both of which are characterized by the same stylistics features within the cathegory of scholarly style but differ in the date of origin (1500-1620 for one set, 1950- for the other). Analysis is focused on the issue to which extent are semantic relations in the discourse structure marked up by explicit lexical means, i. e. by the discourse connectives. The sets of text samples were annotated according to the scheme used for the discourse annotation in The Prague Dependency Treebank. The hypothesis was confirmed that discourse relations are marked up by the discourse connectives more frequently in the set of texts from the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century than in the other set. It turns out in further investigation that the difference mentioned above was caused by different conventions in placing discourse connectives rather than by establishing different semantic relations between textual units. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)