THE CLASSIFICATION OF COHERENCE RELATIONS AND THEIR LINGUISTIC MARKERS - AN EXPLORATION OF 2 LANGUAGES

It has become popular among discourse linguists to explain a text's co herence by identifying 'coherence relations' which apply at various le vels between its component spans. However, there is currently no overa ll agreement about how to define a standard set of coherence relations , and even about what the coherence relations in a text are intended t o represent. In this paper, both questions are addressed: we outline a conception of relations as modelling psychological constructs used by readers and writers, and suggest how a limited set of categories of c oherence relations can be identified. We relate two independent method s for investigating relations, one drawing mainly on psycholinguistic experiments on Dutch speaking subjects, the other starting from a stud y of the 'cue phrases' used to signal relations in English text. Both approaches lead to classifications of relations and cue phrases. We ex amine to what extent these classifications converge - and to what exte nt they accord with the psychologically motivated classification - in a comparative study of a set of cue phrases in English and Dutch. Inte resting similarities are noted on both counts.