Wilbert Spooren

Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations

Understanding a discourse means constructing a coherent representation of that discourse. Inferring coherence relations, such as cause‐consequence and claim‐argument, is a necessary condition for a discourse representation to be coherent. Despite some descriptively fairly adequate proposals in the literature, there is still no theoretically satisfying account of the links that make a discourse coherent. An adequate account of the relations establishing coherence has to be psychologically plausible, because coherence relations are ultimately cognitive relations. We are proposing a taxonomy that classifies coherence relations in terms of four cognitively salient primitives, such as the polarity of the relation and the pragmatic or semantic character of the link between the units. A classification experiment using fragments of written discourse showed that the 12 classes of coherence relations distinguished in the taxonomy appear to be intuitively plausible and applicable. A second experiment investigating t...

Coding coherence relations: Reliability and validity

Abstract This paper tackles the issue of the validity and reliability of coding discourse phenomena in corpus-based analyses. On the basis of a sample analysis of coherence relation annotation that resulted in a poor kappa score, we describe the problem and put it into the context of recent literature from the field of computational linguistics on required intercoder agreement. We describe our view on the consequences of the current state of the art and suggest three routes to follow in the coding of coherence relations: double coding (including discussion of disagreements and explicitation of the coding decisions), single coding (including the risk of coder bias, and a lack of generalizability), and enriched kappa statistics (including observed and specific agreement, and a discussion of the (possible reasons for) disagreement). We end with a plea for complimentary techniques for testing the robustness of our data with the help of automatic (text mining) techniques.

The processing of underspecified coherence relations

One reason discourse coheres is because coherence relations such as Cause‐Consequence can be inferred between the sentences that function as the building blocks of the discourse. This article discusses cases in which the coherence relation remains underspecified: A connective is used that does not “literally” express the intended coherence relation. Underspecification has been dealt with in pragmatics and psycho‐linguistics. The purpose of this artice is to give an analysis of the phenomenon in pragmatic terms, as well as different strategies of how language users deal with these issues, phrased in terms of Horns (1984) Q‐ and R‐principle. Apart from that, data from the psycholinguistic literature on the interpretation of underspecified relations and data from language acquisition research are presented that suggest that both speakers and hearers tend to be cooperative in using underspecified relations.

Toward Automatic Determination of the Semantics of Connectives in Large Newspaper Corpora.

We explored the possibility of using automatic techniques to analyze the use of backward causal connectives in large Dutch newspaper corpora. With the help of 2 techniques, Latent Semantic Analysis and Thematic Text Analysis, the contexts of more than 14,000 connectives were studied. The method of analysis is described. We found that differences that have been suggested in the literature via hand-based analyses between these types of connectives (e.g., on dimensions such as subjectivity, change in perspective, and factuality of the connected segments) also appear in our corpus of 16.5 million words.

The role of interest and text structure in professional reading

Students can be regarded as professional readers: they have to attend to, comprehend and remember the most important information in instructional texts, often about topics they are not readily interested in. Optimising such instructional texts has been the subject of much reading research. This research has shown robust effects for the influence of text structure: information highlighted by a strongly organising structure is retained better than seemingly less important information. Hidi and Baird (1986) suggest that such effects of structure are artefacts, because of the dullness of texts used in such experiments. They argue that readers mainly use interest instead of structure as their guide for attention and learning. In this article three related experiments using Dutch instructional texts are reported. Both interest and text structure were manipulated as within-item factors, and on-line as well as off-line methods were used to measure effects on the reading process and product. The outcomes show no support for the hypothesis of Hidi and Baird: students learn better from texts that are well structured, regardless of the interest of the text or its topic.

Reading and knowledge transfer in Ghana: the behaviour, attitudes and self-concepts of first-year students in Bachelor of Education programmes

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it is an attempt to fill in the blanks on the unexplored map of reading behaviours, attitudes, and self-concept of teacher education students in Ghana. Secondly, it investigates whether the negative perceptions of lecturers from the University of Cape Coast (UCC) and the University of Education Winneba (UEW) about their students’ reading attitudes and behaviour correspond to the students’ self-perceptions. We investigated the reading attitudes, behaviour, and self-concept of 316 students from UCC and UEW. Outcomes showed that spending time on reading for enjoyment is not popular amongst students. A surprisingly positive attitude towards reading for school, for enjoyment and self-concept of reading amongst students was found. This is contradictory to the negative perceptions of lecturers at UCC and UEW. The correlations we found between reading behaviour, attitude and self-concept are in line with recent reading research findings.

Quoted discourse in Dutch news narratives

This chapter adapts an existing model of discourse presentation to examine what journalistic narrators actually do when they represent words uttered previously by news sources, and how linguistic choices express the function such presentations may fulfil. It briefly addresses how quoted discourse is discussed and categorized in literature and systematically investigates what types of quotation occur in a corpus of older and recent Dutch news texts. As material, a corpus of Dutch newspaper texts was assembled in two sub-corpora. The first sub-corpus consists of old newspaper texts from 1950, and the second of recent newspaper texts from 2002. Both sub-corpora were taken from five national Dutch newspapers and eight sections. The texts from 1950 were copied from microfilm, the 2002 texts were extracted from the international newspaper database Lexis Nexis. All news texts in the corpus were closely read, marking out each instance of discourse presentation. Keywords: Dutch News Text; journalistic narrators; Lexis Nexis; linguistic choices

Motives for health information behavior: Patterns more refined than traditional dichotomies. A study among women in a cervix treatment process

ABSTRACT Health consumers are increasingly expected to play an active role with respect to their health and make informed decisions. Therefore, it is essential that health information meets the needs and expectations of health consumers. Online health information is examined from the perspectives of patients with uterine cervical dysplasia undergoing a frequently performed gynecological procedure at an outpatient clinic of a general, top clinical Dutch hospital. The information behavior of 40 women was studied qualitatively by means of interviews and observations in three phases from the start of their medical episode: the emergence or lack of information needs (interviews); the choice for particular information sources or channels (interviews); and searching for information on the Internet (both observations and interviews). The results of the study identified five patterns of information behavior: inactive/passive (N = 5), sensitive/limited (N = 7), selective/problem solving (N = 5), constructive/explorative (N = 8), and assertive/browsing (N = 4). Examples of corresponding recommendations are discussed which aim at optimizing health information.

Culture and discourse structure: A comparative study of Dutch and Iranian news texts

Many studies of structure in present-day Western news texts have shown that the dominant structure is the inverted pyramid, even if the use of a chronological narrative structure is acknowledged. However, the relevant literature has exclusively investigated Western news texts. In this study, we challenge the dominance of the inverted news structure by including a non-Western and less-investigated culture and ask whether textual structure of news texts can differ between cultural contexts. In total, 100 crime news texts from national Iranian and Dutch newspapers were analyzed for both the overall text and the journalists’ statements. Those texts that showed a hybrid structure (combining inverted pyramid and chronology) were subsequently studied qualitatively to understand how chronology is applied in them. News texts from the two cultures were significantly different in their structure. Qualitative analysis of the journalistic statements uncovered a quotation-based structure, a way of news writing in Iranian journalistic statements in which the journalist mainly narrates reporting eventualities that are new to Western eyes. The study offers implications for further ethnography of news and communication, suggesting that the role, pattern and effects of (journalistic) communication can be culture-specific.

Surface cues of content and tenor in text

This special issue of Discourse Processes contains a selection of articles from the workshop Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse (MAD03)—a biennial workshop bringing together researchers from various disciplines and with a mutual interest in the study of discourse. The 2003 edition’s aim was to tackle the issue of how to analyze content and tenor of texts. This topic has a background in various disciplines, which were all represented at the workshop: content analysis, discourse psychology, and computational and cognitive–functional linguistics. A number of articles addressed questions concerning the cues signaling a text’s content and tenor and the kind of information or effect that is conveyed this way. Four manuscripts evolving from these articles were selected for this issue. They are examples of the various approachesofdiscourseanalysismakinguseof textcorpora.Different statisticaland computational techniques are used to analyze surface cues that signal content or tenor in texts. In this introduction, we present a short overview of current topics in corpus analysis as a tool for discourse analysis. We will show how the four contributions to this special issue represent recent developments.