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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton September 12, 2013

Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora

  • Sandrine Zufferey

    Sandrine Zufferey (born 1978, PhD University of Geneva, 2007) is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the acquisition and processing of discourse connectives. Her work also takes a cross-linguistic perspective in order to study the way specific constraints in different languages can affect cognitive processes.

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    and Liesbeth Degand

    Liesbeth Degand (born 1967, PhD University of Louvain, 1997) is a professor in Linguistics at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Her main research interests go to the (corpus-based) study of discourse structure, especially discourse segmentation, and discourse markers in Dutch and French, both in oral and written language, in synchrony and diachrony, and in native as well as learner language.

Abstract

Discourse connectives are lexical items indicating coherence relations between discourse segments. Even though many languages possess a whole range of connectives, important divergences exist cross-linguistically in the number of connectives that are used to express a given relation. For this reason, connectives are not easily paired with a univocal translation equivalent across languages. This paper is a first attempt to design a reliable method to annotate the meaning of discourse connectives cross-linguistically using corpus data. We present the methodological choices made to reach this aim and report three annotation experiments using the framework of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank.

About the authors

Sandrine Zufferey

Sandrine Zufferey (born 1978, PhD University of Geneva, 2007) is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the acquisition and processing of discourse connectives. Her work also takes a cross-linguistic perspective in order to study the way specific constraints in different languages can affect cognitive processes.

Liesbeth Degand

Liesbeth Degand (born 1967, PhD University of Louvain, 1997) is a professor in Linguistics at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Her main research interests go to the (corpus-based) study of discourse structure, especially discourse segmentation, and discourse markers in Dutch and French, both in oral and written language, in synchrony and diachrony, and in native as well as learner language.

Published Online: 2013-9-12
Published in Print: 2017-9-26

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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