Cognitive complexity and the linguistic marking of coherence relations: A parallel corpus study

Abstract Coherence relations can be made linguistically explicit by means of connectives (e.g., but, because) or cue phrases (e.g., on the other hand, which is why), but can also be left implicit and conveyed through the juxtaposition of two clauses or sentences. However, it seems that not all relations are equally easy to reconstruct when they are implicit. In this paper, we explore which features of coherence relations make them more, or less, likely to be conveyed implicitly. We adopt the assumption that expected relations are more often implicit than relations that are not expected, and propose to determine a relation's expectedness using the notion of cognitive complexity. We test our hypotheses by means of a parallel corpus study, in which we analyze the translations of explicit English coherence relations from the Europarl Direct corpus into four target languages: Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. We find that cognitive complexity indeed influences the linguistic marking of coherence relations, and that this does not vary between the languages in our corpus. In addition, we find that a relation's relational and syntactic dependency also influences its linguistic marking, but that these measures are not completely independent of relation type.

[1]  S. Granger,et al.  Connector usage in the English essay writing of native and non‐native EFL speakers of English , 1996 .

[2]  Vera Demberg,et al.  Implicitness of Discourse Relations , 2012, COLING.

[3]  R Core Team,et al.  R: A language and environment for statistical computing. , 2014 .

[4]  Bonnie Webber,et al.  Implicitation of Discourse Connectives in (Machine) Translation , 2013, DiscoMT@ACL.

[5]  Eve Sweetser,et al.  Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions , 2005 .

[6]  J. Piaget.  Judgement and Reasoning in the Child , 1962 .

[7]  Erich Steiner,et al.  Cohesive explicitness and explicitation in an English-German translation corpus , 2007 .

[8]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content , 1972 .

[9]  Rashmi Prasad,et al.  The Penn Discourse Treebank , 2004, LREC.

[10]  Rolf A. Zwaan,et al.  Situation models in language comprehension and memory. , 1998, Psychological bulletin.

[11]  Laurence R. Horn,et al.  The handbook of pragmatics , 2004 .

[12]  J. D. Murray.  Connectives and narrative text: The role of continuity , 1997, Memory & cognition.

[13]  E. M. Segal,et al.  The role of interclausal connectives in narrative structuring: Evidence from adults' interpretations of simple stories , 1991 .

[14]  J. Spenader,et al.  RESULT and PURPOSE relations with and without 'so' , 2014 .

[15]  Leo G. M. Noordman,et al.  Coherence relations in a cognitive theory of discourse representation , 1993 .

[16]  Livio Robaldo,et al.  The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 Annotation Manual , 2007 .

[17]  M. Taboada,et al.  DISCOURSE MARKERS AS SIGNALS (OR NOT) OF RHETORICAL RELATIONS , 2006 .

[18]  Alistair Knott,et al.  Semantic and Pragmatic relations and their intended effects , 2001 .

[19]  Roger Levy,et al.  Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction , 2006, NIPS.

[20]  Masumi Narita,et al.  Connector Usage in the English Essay Writing of Japanese EFL Learners , 2004, LREC.

[21]  Christina Wipf,et al.  Übersetzung * Translation * Traduction: An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies , 1994 .

[22]  L. Bloom,et al.  Complex sentences: acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode , 1980, Journal of Child Language.

[23]  J. House,et al.  Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation , 1996 .

[24]  Helen Goodluck,et al.  First language acquisition. , 2011, Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science.

[25]  Wilbert Spooren,et al.  The processing of underspecified coherence relations , 1997 .

[26]  Leo G. M. Noordman,et al.  Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations , 1992 .

[27]  Herbert H. Clark,et al.  Semantics and comprehension , 1976 .

[28]  B. Ross.  The Psychology of Learning and Motivation , 2012 .

[29]  M. Pickering,et al.  Influence of Connectives on Language Comprehension: Eye tracking Evidence for Incremental Interpretation , 1997 .

[30]  Austin F. Frank,et al.  Speaking Rationally: Uniform Information Density as an Optimal Strategy for Language Production , 2008 .

[31]  Philipp Koehn,et al.  Europarl: A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation , 2005, MTSUMMIT.

[32]  George Barlow.  Parallel texts and corpus-based contrastive analysis , 2008 .

[33]  T. Sanders,et al.  Discovering domains On the acquisition of causal connectives , 2011 .

[34]  Jan Renkema,et al.  Discourse Studies: An Introductory Textbook , 1993 .

[35]  Paul van den Broek,et al.  Causal Inferences and The Comprehension of Narrative Texts , 1990 .

[36]  S. Zufferey.  Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind: The Acquisition of Connectives , 2010 .

[37]  K. Gwet.  Kappa Statistic is not Satisfactory for Assessing the Extent of Agreement Between Raters , 2002 .

[38]  Bruno Cartoni,et al.  Using the Europarl corpus for cross-linguistic research , 2013 .

[39]  Ted Sanders,et al.  Causality, cognition and communication: A mental space analysis of subjectivity in causal connectives , 2009 .

[40]  Simone Müller,et al.  Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse , 2005 .

[41]  H. Maat.  Classifying negative coherence relations on the basis of linguistic evidence , 1998 .

[42]  T. Sanders,et al.  Causal connectives in discourse processing: How differences in subjectivity are reflected in eye movements , 2013 .

[43]  T. Sanders,et al.  The role of causality in discourse processing: Effects of expectation and coherence relations , 2013 .

[44]  Linguistics and Adjacent Arts and Sciences , 1977, Current Anthropology.

[45]  Rolf A. Zwaan,et al.  The Construction of Situation Models in Narrative Comprehension: An Event-Indexing Model , 1995 .

[46]  K. Haberlandt,et al.  Verbs contribute to the coherence of brief narratives: Reading related and unrelated sentence triples , 1978 .

[47]  W. Kintsch,et al.  Are Good Texts Always Better? Interactions of Text Coherence, Background Knowledge, and Levels of Understanding in Learning From Text , 1996 .

[48]  Arie Verhagen,et al.  Concession implies causality, though in some other space , 2000 .

[49]  Leo G. M. Noordman,et al.  On the processing of causal relations , 2000 .

[50]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition , 1998 .

[51]  T. Sanders,et al.  The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages , 1998 .

[52]  E. Bates.  Language and context: The acquisition of pragmatics , 1976 .

[53]  Ted Sanders,et al.  The Role of Coherence Relations and Their Linguistic Markers in Text Processing , 2000 .

[54]  A. Feinstein,et al.  High agreement but low kappa: I. The problems of two paradoxes. , 1990, Journal of clinical epidemiology.

[55]  Anneloes R. Canestrelli.  Small words, big effects? Subjective versus objective causal connectives in discourse processing , 2013 .

[56]  Vera Demberg,et al.  The time-course of processing discourse connectives , 2013, CogSci.

[57]  Livio Robaldo,et al.  The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. , 2008, LREC.

[58]  Yasuko Obana,et al.  Co-authorship of Joint utterances in Japanese , 2015, Dialogue Discourse.

[59]  T. Sanders,et al.  Causality and subjectivity in discourse: The meaning and use of causal connectives in spontaneous conversation, chat interactions and written text , 2014 .

[60]  William C. Mann,et al.  Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization , 1988 .

[61]  Jet Hoek,et al.  The Role of Expectedness in the Implicitation and Explicitation of Discourse Relations , 2015, DiscoMT@EMNLP.

[62]  Michael J Cortese,et al.  Handbook of Psycholinguistics , 2011 .

[63]  Andrei Popescu-Belis,et al.  Using Sense-labeled Discourse Connectives for Statistical Machine Translation , 2012, ESIRMT/HyTra@EACL.

[64]  Mario Bisiada.  ‘Lösen Sie Schachtelsätze möglichst auf ’: The impact of editorial guidelines on sentence splitting in German business article translations , 2016 .

[65]  Sandrine Zufferey,et al.  Methodological issues in the use of parallel directional corpora: A case study with English and French concessive connectives. , 2017 .

[66]  T. Sanders,et al.  The emergence of Dutch connectives; how cumulative cognitive complexity explains the order of acquisition* , 2008, Journal of Child Language.

[67]  Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen,et al.  Information packaging and translation: Aspects of translational sentence splitting (German – English/Norwegian) , 1999 .

[68]  D. Chambers,et al.  Loose talk. , 2008, The Journal of the American College of Dentists.

[69]  T. Hothorn,et al.  Simultaneous Inference in General Parametric Models , 2008, Biometrical journal. Biometrische Zeitschrift.

[70]  Maite Taboada,et al.  Annotation upon Annotation: Adding Signalling Information to a Corpus of Discourse Relations , 2013, Dialogue Discourse.

[71]  Viktor Becher,et al.  When and why do translators add connectives?: A corpus-based study , 2011 .

[72]  Maite Taboada,et al.  EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT COHERENCE RELATIONS : A CORPUS STUDY , 2013 .

[73]  Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul,et al.  Connectives as Processing Signals: How Students Benefit in Processing Narrative and Expository Texts , 2015 .

[74]  S. Zufferey,et al.  The Role of Perspective Shifts for Processing and Translating Discourse Relations , 2016 .

[75]  A. Verhagen.  Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition , 2007 .

[76]  Anthony J. Sanford,et al.  Processing causals and diagnostics in discourse , 1997 .

[77]  Andrew Kehler,et al.  Predicting the Presence of Discourse Connectives , 2013, EMNLP.

[78]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Causal thinking and the representation of narrative events , 1985 .

[79]  S. Zufferey,et al.  A Multifactorial Analysis of Explicitation in Translation , 2014 .

[80]  S. Zufferey,et al.  Processing Connectives with a Complex Form-Function Mapping in L2: The Case of French “En Effet” , 2017, Front. Psychol..

[81]  Jet Hoek,et al.  Segmenting discourse: Incorporating interpretation into segmentation? , 2018 .

[82]  T. Sanders,et al.  The acquisition order of coherence relations : On cognitive complexity in discourse , 2008 .

[83]  Sandrine Zufferey,et al.  Representing the meaning of discourse connectives for multilingual purposes. , 2014 .

[84]  R. V. Veen,et al.  The acquisition of causal connectives: the role of parental input and cognitive complexity , 2011 .

[85]  A. Sanford,et al.  Processing causal and diagnostic statements in discourse , 1997 .

[86]  Sandrine Zufferey,et al.  Methodological issues in the use of directional parallel corpora , 2017 .

[87]  Livio Robaldo,et al.  Corpus-driven Semantics of Concession: Where do Expectations Come from? , 2014, Dialogue Discourse.

[88]  Deirdre Wilson,et al.  Relevance theory: A tutorial , 2002 .

[89]  Michel Fayol,et al.  Processing interclausal relationships : studies in the production and comprehension of text , 1997 .

[90]  Haidee Kruger,et al.  The effects of editorial intervention: implications for studies of the features of translated language , 2017 .