Coherence relations in discourse
Name
Maite Taboada
e-mail
mtaboada@sfu.ca
Postal address
Department of Linguistics
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Dr.
Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6
Canada
Homepage
www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada/
Course title
Coherence relations in discourse
Course level
Masterclass (only for advanced PhD students)
Course description
We will accept a maximum of 12 PhD students for this masterclass. Registration
for this course requires participants to submit a short summary of their research.
The teacher will select the participants on the basis of their research summary.
The masterclass will consist of presentations and discussions provided by the
participants and regulated by the teacher. You will be asked to give a
presentation on your own research results and progress. Once accepted by the
teacher, you will be contacted by him/her on the presentation schedule and other
practicalities.
This course focuses on coherence relations in discourse. By coherence relations
we understand those between propositions, within and across sentences, referred
to as coherence relations, discourse relations, or rhetorical relations. They are
paratactic (coordinate) or hypotactic (subordinate) relations that hold across two
or more text spans, such as Elaboration, Condition, Concession, Antithesis or
Summary. Coherence relations have been proposed as an explanation for the
construction of coherence in discourse.
Topics of particular interest in this course will be:
 Cognitive validity of coherence relations. Are they cognitive entities or not?
 Signalling of relations in discourse. Types of signals and status of
‘unsignalled’ or implicit relations
 Corpus studies, within and across genres and languages
 Computational applications (in information extraction, summarization,
essay scoring, sentiment analysis)
Reading list
Readings or links to readings available from course web page:
http://www.sfu.ca/~mtaboada/lot/lot.html
 Taboada, Maite and William C. Mann (2006) Rhetorical Structure Theory:
Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies, 8 (3): 423-459.
 Taboada, Maite (2009) Implicit and explicit coherence relations. In J.
Renkema (Ed.), Discourse, of Course (pp. 127-140). Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
 Spooren, Wilbert and Ted Sanders (2008) The acquisition order of coherence
relations: On cognitive complexity in discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40
(12): 2003-2026.
 Webber, Bonnie and Aravind K Joshi (2012) Discourse structure: Past,
present and future, Proceedings of the ACL 2012 Workshop on Rediscovering
50 Years of Discoveries (pp. 42-54). Jeju, Korea.
Registration
For application go to the general registration form.
You will be notified of your acceptance shortly after the registration has closed.