Levels of representation in

discourse relations

ALISTAIR KNOTT, TED SANDERS, and JON OBERLANDER*

1. Cognitive linguistics and discourse

Most schools of linguistics have their foundations in a study of the syntax
and semantics of individual sentences. Cognitive linguistics is to some
extent no exception: while it has always devoted considerable attention to
the conceptual aspects of linguistic meaning and to the study of language
in use, the focus of research has still traditionally been on single sentences
or propositions rather than on larger units of text and discourse.
However, within many schools of linguistics, a signi®cant body of work
on discourse structure has developed over the last ®fteen years or so.
Discourse-oriented studies in cognitive and functional linguistics include
research on the discourse function of syntactic constructions such as
subordinate clauses (Tomlin 1985; Matthiessen and Thompson 1987;
Ramsay 1987) as well as on the need for functional and usage-based
analyses of discourse (Langacker 2001; Barlow and Kemmer 2000).
Discourse-oriented work in formal linguistics centers around the in¯u-
ential dynamic semantic theories of Kamp and Heim (see, for example,
Kamp and Reyle 1993), Heim (1982), and latterly Veltman (1996), which
focus on issues relating to anaphora and presuppositions. In compu-
tational linguistics, there is a growing body of work on the interpretation
and generation of extended texts; see, for instance, Lascarides and Asher
(1993) or Strube and Hahn (1996) for discourse interpretation, and Hovy
(1993) or Marcu (1997) for discourse generation.
Interestingly, at the discourse level, the dividing line between cognitive
linguistic approaches and traditional approaches seems less clear cut than
at the sentence level. Many of the controversial proposals in cognitive
linguistics concern the status of sentence syntax, in particular the question
of whether syntax is an autonomous and purely formal level of repre-
sentation (cf. Langacker 1986; Jackendo€ 1996). However, it is widely
accepted that purely formal or syntactic principles play a far smaller role

Cognitive Linguistics 12±3 (2001), 197±209 0936±5907/01/0012±0197

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198 A. Knott, T. Sanders, and J. Oberlander

at the discourse level (see for example Halliday and Hasan 1976): it is
hard, for instance, to make much sense of the idea of a structurally
``well-formed'' but semantically anomalous discourse. There is a con-
sensus that the well-formedness of a piece of discourse is primarily to do
with its meaningÐspeci®cally, to do with whether the meanings of its
component sentences can be related together to form a coherent message.
In formal and computational discourse linguistics, this point emerges
in the emphasis on the role of world knowledge in discourse processing
(see, e.g., Hobbs 1985; Hobbs et al. 1993; Lascarides and Asher 1993).
In cognitive linguistics, a similar point emerges from the suggestion that
a coherent text must emerge from, and lead to, a coherent cognitive
representation (Sanders et al. 1992). In short, for research on discourse
structure, there is considerable scope for the integration of work in
cognitive linguistics with that from other traditions within linguistics.
Purely from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, there are two
further interesting reasons why the study of discourse is of particular
relevance. Firstly, there is the issue of categorization, which has a long
tradition in cognitive linguistics. Human beings categorize the world
around them, usually unconsciously. The linguistic categories apparent
in people's everyday language use have provided many interesting
insights into the working of the mind (see, for instance, Lako€ 1987;
Lako€ and Johnson 1999). In (text) linguistic approaches to discourse,
the categorization of di€erent types of structural and semantic relations,
and of the linguistic devices expressing them (connectives, lexical phrases)
has played a prominent role over the last decade. For instance, the way
in which speakers categorize related events by expressing them with
one connective (because) rather than another (since) can be treated as
an act of categorization that reveals language users' ways of thinking.
On the basis of careful meaning-oriented analyses, it has been argued
that the meaning and use of such connectives can be explained in terms
of domains of use (Sweetser 1990) or di€erent sources of coherence
(van Dijk 1977; Sanders et al. 1992; Knott and Dale 1994). This particular
topic plays a major role in this special issue, because several contributions
aim at rede®ning these existing distinctions, making use of constructs like
subjectivity (following Langacker 1990) and perspective (Sanders and
Spooren 1997).
Secondly, one of the main concerns of cognitive linguistics is to develop
integrated theories of language structure and language processes.
Cognitive linguistics has already found ways to do just that: by assuming
that structures and processes should be treated on a par, instead of
separately (cf. Langacker 1987). The level of discourse readily presents
itself as the ideal level in the study of language at which to further ¯esh

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 Levels of representation in discourse relations 199

out this claim (Sanders 1997b). A crucial characteristic of discourse is

that it shows coherence. Relational coherence is one fundamental type of
coherence: people connect discourse segments by inferring coherence
relations of some kind, be it causal, contrastive or additive. Although
coherence is generally considered a cognitive phenomenon, relatively
independent of the exact linguistic realization in the discourse itself, both
linguists and psycholinguists assume that connectives have the function of
signaling relationships between discourse segments, thereby ``instructing''
interlocutors to construct a coherence relation between two clauses
(see, among others, Gernsbacher and GivoÂn 1995; Noordman and Vonk
1997; Sanders and Spooren 2001). The study of linguistic markers of
coherence from such a cognitive point of view leads to an account
of language as a processing instructor. This holds not just for the study of
connectives, as we will show, but also for other coherence markers, such
as those of referential coherence. The grammar of referential coherence
plays an important role in mental operations connecting incoming infor-
mation to existing mental representations. For instance, on the basis
of their linguistic realization, referent NPs are identi®ed as either those
that will be important and topical, or as those that will be unimportant
and nontopical. Hence, topical referents are persistent in the mental
representation of subsequent discourse, whereas the nontopical ones are
not (see Ariel 2001; Chafe 1994; GivoÂn 1995). As for relational coherence,
there are many similar examplesÐbased on corpus studiesÐof this line of
work in the functional linguistic literature, for instance on the tendency
subordinated clauses exhibit for containing background information (see,
for example, Tomlin 1985), or on the discourse function of if/when-clauses
(Haiman 1992; Ramsay 1987) and purpose clauses (see Thompson 1985;
Matthiessen and Thompson 1987 on in order to). The discourse function
of purpose clauses appears to depend on their placement in relation to
the main clause. In medial or ®nal position their role is a local elabora-
tion, but in initial position their role becomes one of foregrounding
information. They signal how to interpret the directly following clause
and how to attach it to the preceding text.

2. Discourse relations
In both cognitive linguistics and other traditions, an important building
block for theories of discourse coherence is the notion of a discourse
relation (also known in the literature as a coherence or rhetorical rela-
tion). Discourse relations are meaning relations which connect two
text segments (minimally, single clauses). Examples are relations like
CAUSE±CONSEQUENCE, LIST, and PROBLEM±SOLUTION. Such relations can be

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200 A. Knott, T. Sanders, and J. Oberlander

explicitly signaled by linguistic markers such as sentence or clause con-

nectives; alternatively they can be left unsignaled for a reader or hearer
to infer. Whether they are signaled or not, the key intuition in a theory
of relations is that the coherence of a text can be attributed, in whole or
in part, to the presence of appropriate relations between its constituent
sentences and clauses.
Of course, the proposal that a text is coherent in virtue of its discourse
relations is vacuous until further information about the nature of these
relations is provided. Firstly (and most obviously), a theory of relation
semantics is required, which speci®es what kind of relations constitute
discourse relations. There is a relation of some kind between every
conceivable pair of sentences or clauses, even those whose juxtaposition
does not result in a coherent segment of text: we are interested in
identifying those relations whose presence between two juxtaposed
sentences or clauses ensures or contributes to the coherence of the
resulting complex text span. Secondly, a theory of span structure is
needed, which indicates whereabouts in a coherent text discourse rela-
tions might be expected to be found. Must there be a discourse relation
between every pair of adjacent sentences, for instance? How is coherence
ensured between text units larger than sentences? Thirdly, a theory of
relation signaling is needed, indicating how discourse relations manifest
themselves in surface text, particularly in the form of sentence and clause
conjunctions. Theories of relation signaling range from those which
advocate a complete dissociation of discourse relations from conjunctive
signals (cf. Mann and Thompson 1988) to proposals that the set of
conjunctions tells us fairly directly about the set of discourse relations
(cf. Knott 1996; Knott and Sanders 1998). Other researchers are interested
in the semantics of conjunctions as a topic in its own right, and are not
primarily concerned with the role they play in a theory of discourse
coherence (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976; Martin 1992). Much of the utility
of the concept of a discourse relation derives from the way it sets up these
three more precise research questions, and thus helps to structure the task
of developing a theory of discourse coherence.
The articles in this special issue focus predominantly on issues con-
cerning relation semantics. Most of the texts studied in the articles
presented in this issue are relatively small, typically pairs of sentences or
clauses ( perhaps with some preceding or subsequent context), allowing
the study of a single intersentential/interclausal relation. The assumption
is that relations between adjacent sentences or clauses will constitute a
key component of any theory of span structure, and that they are
therefore worth studying in isolation. The articles presented here also
take a similar perspective on relation signaling, focusing for the most

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 Levels of representation in discourse relations 201

part on discourse relations signaled explicitly by sentence or clause

connectives, either because of an explicit interest in the semantics of
connectives, or because of a decision to use connectives as an empirical
window onto discourse relations.

3. A parameterization of discourse relations

In the last decade, much research in relation semantics has focused on the
question of how to taxonomize or classify the set of discourse relations
(Hovy 1990; Knott and Dale 1994; Pander Maat 1998; Redeker 1990;
Sanders 1997a). While work on the hierarchical classi®cation of discourse
relations goes back at least as far as Ballard, Conrad, and Longacre (1971),
Grimes (1975), and Halliday and Hasan (1976), the idea that a small
number of reasonably orthogonal primitives is responsible for the dif-
ferences amongst discourse relations is more recent, deriving from Hobbs
(1985) and Sanders, Spooren, and Noordman (1992, 1993). The articles
in this special issue all adopt this assumption to some degree.
To get a feel for some of the primitives which underlie discourse
relations, consider the following short texts:

(1) Gareth gets on well with Betty. He loves disco music; she loves it too.
(2) Gareth and Edith have di€erent musical tastes. He loves disco
music, while she despises it.
(3) Gareth grew up during the seventies, so he loves disco music.
(4) Edith grew up during the seventies, but she despises disco music.

The relations in examples (1) and (2) have something in common because
they both make comparisons between two individuals. The relations in
examples (3) and (4) can also be argued to have something in common,
because they both rely on a piece of presupposed knowledge, namely that
people who grew up during the seventies are likely to love disco music.
Note also that the di€erence between examples (1) and (2) resembles the
di€erence between examples (3) and (4). If you negate the last clause in
examples (1) and (3), the resulting relations are the same as those in
examples (2) and (4), respectively, and the conjunctions must be changed
to restore coherence. We can hypothesize that the relations in these
examples are composite constructs, de®ned in terms of two primitive
bivalued parameters: one parameter might distinguish between COMPAR-
ATIVE and CAUSAL relations, and the other might distinguish between
POSITIVE and NEGATIVE relations. Elaborating this simple account of
relation semantics involves framing suitable de®nitions for these param-
eters, and for additional parameters, in a way that allows the de®nitions

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202 A. Knott, T. Sanders, and J. Oberlander

to interact so as to produce an appropriate range of composite relation

de®nitions.
A dominant distinction in existing classi®cation proposals is that
between so-called SEMANTIC relations (also known, to some degree
of approximation, as IDEATIONAL, EXTERNAL or CONTENT relations) and
PRAGMATIC relations (also known as PRESENTATIONAL or INTERNAL
relations). SEMANTIC relations, informally speaking, hold between the
propositional content of the two related discourse segments, i.e. between
their locutionary meanings; PRAGMATIC relations, on the other hand,
involve the illocutionary meaning of one or both the related segments.
To illustrate, consider the following examples:
(5) The neighbors left for Paris last Friday. So they are not at home.
(6) The lights in the neighbors' living room are out. So they are not
at home.
The relation in (5) can be interpreted as SEMANTIC because it connects
two events in the world; our knowledge allows us to relate the segments
as coherent in the world. A relation like that in example (5) could be
paraphrased as ``the cause in the ®rst segment (S1) leads to the fact
reported in the second segment (S2)''. In example (6), however, the two
discourse segments are related because we understand the second part as
a conclusion from evidence in the ®rst, and not because there is a causal
relation between two states of a€airs in the world: it is not because the
lights are out that the neighbors are not at home. The causal relation in
example (6) could be paraphrased as ``the description in S1 gives rise to
the conclusion or belief formulated in S2''. Hence the relation in this
example is PRAGMATIC. The use of the connective so in both examples
suggests that it can operate at di€erent levels of representation within a
discourse, indicating a causal relation either at the level of propositional
content or at the level of speaker intentions or illocutionary force. The
distinction between SEMANTIC and PRAGMATIC levels of representation is
noted by many students of discourse coherence; however, there is a
great deal of discussion about the exact de®nition of the distinction
(see, e.g., Bateman and Rondhuis 1997; Degand 1996, 1992; Hovy 1990;
Knott 1996, 2001; Knott and Sanders 1998; Martin 1992; Moore
and Pollack 1992; Oversteegen 1997; Pander Maat 1998; Sanders 1997a;
Sanders and Spooren 1999). There is also considerable interest in the
question of what work the distinction can do in other areas of natural
language semantics. In particular, within cognitive linguistics, there are
apparent connections with models of the semantics of modal verbs
(cf. Sweetser 1990), perspective (cf. Sanders and Redeker 1996; Sanders
and Spooren 1997), and mental spaces (cf. Fauconnier 1994; Fauconnier

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 Levels of representation in discourse relations 203

and Sweetser 1996; Dancygier and Sweetser 2000; Verhagen 2000).

Alongside these discussions about SEMANTIC and PRAGMATIC relations,
there are parallel discussions relating to the de®nitions of other discourse
relation parameters, and to the relevance of these other parameters
to other topics in natural language semantics (see for instance Pander
Maat 1999).
The articles in this special issue have their origins in papers presented
at a workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in July 1999 on
``Levels of Representation in Discourse''. The workshop addressed the
general question of how to derive a set of parameter de®nitions for dis-
course relations. A number of issues were subsumed under this general
topic, in particular the following:
± What are the relevant parameters in terms of which discourse relations
can vary, and how should they be de®ned?
± How can empirical evidence be sought for a proposed parameter or
set of parameters?
± What relation do the parameters of discourse relations have to other
issues in linguistic semantics?
The workshop was interdisciplinary in its conception, with participation
from cognitive linguists, computational linguists, formal logicians and
psycholinguists. The articles in this issue re¯ect the issues which arose
most prominently during the workshop.
The articles by Pander Maat and Degand and by Pander Maat and
Sanders squarely address the question of the de®nition of SEMANTIC and
PRAGMATIC relations. The main proposal by Degand and Pander Maat is
that SEMANTIC and PRAGMATIC causal relations should be seen as points on
a continuum of relation types, rather than as alternative values for a
discrete bivalued (or trivalued) parameter. The continuum is given by the
degree of speaker involvement in the causal relation being expressed.
Fleshing out this claim involves a reanalysis of existing de®nitions of
SEMANTIC and PRAGMATIC. Evidence for the claim is sought using a corpus
study of the distribution of Dutch and French connectives. Making use
of further corpus data, Pander Maat and Sanders argue that the
distribution of the Dutch connectives daarom `that's why' and dus
`so' cannot be explained in terms of Sweetser's domains, or in terms
of Sanders, Spooren, and Noordman's ``source of coherence'' param-
eter. Searching for the commonalities between volitional and epistemic
relations, they argue for the relevance of the notions of subjectivity
(Langacker 1990) and perspective (as used in, e.g., Sanders and Spooren
1997). Additional evidence is found in an experimental study of the
connectives generated by subjects in a range of discourse contexts.

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204 A. Knott, T. Sanders, and J. Oberlander

An alternative reanalysis of the SEMANTIC/PRAGMATIC distinction is

given in Jayez and Rossari. This article examines a range of conjunctive
markers of causal discourse relations in French, from the perspective
of formal semantics: accordingly, the relation de®nitions put forward
in the article are motivated by their descriptive adequacy in a formal
model of discourse, rather than by empirical experiment. The starting
point for the article is the familiar fact that conjunctions do not always
signal relations between the propositional contents of the clauses they
link; its aim is to characterize the range of semantic objects underlying
clauses (belief states, speech acts, etc.) between which relations can
hold. To begin with, the article presents a formal model of belief states,
and gives an analysis of the role of epistemic modals such as must in
argumentative relations. This formal account allows a subtle analysis of
the ®nding that some causal conjunctions (e.g., de ce fait, du coup), while
holding between belief states, cannot be used to signal a conclusion
reached by abductive reasoning from e€ect to cause, even though
abductive reasoning, just like any reasoning, can be described in terms
of ordinary causal relations between belief states. This analysis is then
extended to account for relations involving speech acts. Again, the
formal speci®cations of the semantics of conjunctions permit some subtle
distinctions to be captured.
The article by Louwerse is concerned not with a single parameter of
variation for discourse relations, but with a set of parameters. The
emphasis in the article is not on the SEMANTIC/PRAGMATIC distinction,
but on distinctions between CAUSAL, ADDITIVE, and TEMPORAL rela-
tions, POSITIVE and NEGATIVE relations, and FORWARD, BACKWARD, and
BIDIRECTIONAL relations. A novel source of information about the
psychological validity of these parameters is used: studies of the eye
movements of subjects reading texts containing relations signaled by
sentence connectives.
Finally, the article by Oberlander and Moore focuses on the inter-
action of two parameters: the order of presentation of the two spans in
a discourse relation, and the placement of conjunctive signals in the
®rst or second span. This research is at the interface between corpus
linguistics and psycholinguistics, but also draws on research in com-
putational treatments of discourse. Empirical evidence about span order
and cue placement is recruited from two sources: corpus analysis and
psycholinguistic experiments involving reading times. Certain orders
and placements are found to be harder to process; surprisingly, how-
ever, they are also relatively common, and often preferred over easier-
to-process alternatives. The explanation proposed for this ®nding
concerns the interaction of information structure with span order and

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 Levels of representation in discourse relations 205

cue placement, and the issue of the level of hierarchy at which a relation
appears in a text.

4. Directions for interdisciplinary work on discourse relations

The articles in this special issue address an overlapping set of research
questions about the semantics of discourse relation parameters, from a
range of di€erent theoretical perspectives. There is a reasonable consen-
sus across the articles about the interesting phenomena to be explained:
in particular, the semantic/pragmatic distinction, or variants of it, and
issues relating to the order of spans in discourse relations. However,
there is not as yet any great consensus about how these phenomena
should be modeled; it will be interesting to see whether further cross-
disciplinary e€orts will strengthen this consensus. A number of con-
crete questions can be posed. For instance, can a formal account of
the semantics of discourse relations such as that given by Jayez and
Rossari deal with Pander Maat and his coauthors' suggestion that cer-
tain dimensions along which relations vary are continuous rather than
discrete? Conversely, can the de®nitions of relation parameters used by
psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistic researchers be formalized in
a logical framework such as that given by Jayez and Rossari? To what
extent are the de®nitions we propose for relations artefacts of the
experimental techniques we use, or of the formal languages we adopt?
Hopefully these questions will be addressed in future interdisciplinary
work on discourse relations.

Received 4 October 2001 Universities of Otago, Utrecht,

and Edinburgh

Note
*Author's e-mail addresses: alik@atlas.otago.ac.nz; Ted Sanders@let.uu.nl; J.Oberlander@
ed.ac.uk.

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