Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora
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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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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 (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 (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.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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- The role of syntactic dependencies in compositional distributional semantics
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- Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is
- The role of syntactic dependencies in compositional distributional semantics
- Topic marking in a Shanghainese corpus: from observation to prediction
- The meaning of intonation in yes-no questions in American English: A corpus study
- Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy
- Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora
