Chapter published in:
The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González and J. Lachlan Mackenzie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 296] 2018
► pp. 13–44

The encoding and signalling of discourse relations in argumentative discourse

Evidence across production formats

| University of Augsburg, Germany
This chapter examines the role of production format in the linguistic realization of discourse relations in the argumentative discourse genre of commentary, distinguishing between implicitly realized discourse relations, encoded in coherence strands and lexical coherence, and overtly realized discourse relations, encoded in coherence strands and additionally signalled with discourse connectives, metadiscursive comments and non-congruently configurated theme zones. The production format comprises single-authored commentaries, monadically edited commentaries and dyadically edited commentaries. The edited texts stem from a discourse-editing task: the source text was stripped of almost all adverbials yet retained the original argumentative sequential organization and default configuration of events. The study is methodologically compositional across functional approaches to discourse grammar, discourse semantics, and discourse pragmatics. The analysis confirms that Contrast is realized overtly by default, Continuation and Explanation tend to be realized overtly in edited texts and Elaboration is realized more frequently overtly in single-authored texts.
Keywords: context, discourse coherence, discourse common ground, discourse relation, overt realization, production format
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse: Quantity and quality
    • 2.1Discourse unit
    • 2.2Discursive glue
  • 3.Discourse relations and their linguistic realizations
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Procedure
    • 4.3Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Continuation
    • 5.2Contrast
    • 5.3Explanation
    • 5.4Elaboration
    • 5.5Comment
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.02fet
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