Kerstin Kunz

Cohesive conjunctions in English and German: systemic contrasts and textual differences

The present paper contrasts strategies of cohesive conjunction in English and German system and text. We clarify the notion of cohesive conjunction by discussing conceptualizations in the literature and by comparing cohesive conjunctions to other cohesive strategies. Using theory-informed methodologies we contrast the resources available in the two languages for explicitly establishing conjunctive relations of cohesion. Moreover, we discuss the first findings from our analysis of an English - German corpus of translations and originals, which reveal differences in the textual realizations in terms of frequencies and functions. Our study complements insights about other types of cohesion investigated in the frame of a larger research project.1

Beyond Identity Coreference: Contrasting Indicators of Textual Coherence in English and German.

This paper focuses on the interaction of chains of coreference identity with other types of relations, comparing English and German data sets in terms of language, mode (written vs. spoken) and register. We first describe the types of coreference and the chain features analysed as indicators of textual coherence and topic continuity. After sketching the feature categories under analysis and the methods used for statistical evaluation, we present the findings from our analysis and interpret them in terms of the contrasts mentioned above. We will also show that for some registers, coreference types other than identity are of great importance.

Across Languages and Genres: Creating a Universal Annotation Scheme for Textual Relations

The present paper describes an attempt to create an interoperable scheme using existing annotations of textual phenomena across languages and genres including non-canonical ones. Such a kind of analysis requires annotated multilingual resources which are costly. Therefore, we make use of annotations already available in the resources for English, German and Czech. As the annotations in these corpora are based on different conceptual and methodological backgrounds, we need an interoperable scheme that covers existing categories and at the same time allows a comparison of the resources. In this paper, we describe how this interoperable scheme was created and which problematic cases we had to consider. The resulting scheme is supposed to be applied in the future to explore contrasts between the three languages under analysis, for which we expect the greatest differences in the degree of variation between non-canonical and canonical language.

English vs. German from a textual perspective: Looking inside chain intersection

This paper presents a cross-lingual corpus-based study on the intersection of chains of coreference and lexical cohesion. The two types of cohesion are often combined and thus play an important role for the development of discourse topics. We analyse chain intersection as cases where chain elements of lexical cohesion occur inside of coreference chains. We use a corpus of English and German original texts from four written and spoken registers which is annotated for both types of cohesion. Our analyses point to contrasts between the two languages and across the four registers under analysis in the types and the number of intersections in coreference chains. This variation has an effect on the way important topics