On the role of discourse relations in persuasive texts

Ines Rehbein


Abstract
This paper investigates the use of explicitly signalled discourse relations in persuasive texts. We present a corpus study where we control for speaker and topic and show that the distribution of different discourse connectives varies considerably across different discourse settings. While this variation can be explained by genre differences, we also observe variation regarding the distribution of discourse relations across different settings. This variation, however, cannot be easily explained by genre differences. We argue that the differences regarding the use of discourse relations reflects different strategies of persuasion and that these might be due to audience design.
Anthology ID:
W19-4017
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Annemarie Friedrich, Deniz Zeyrek, Jet Hoek
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
SIGANN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
144–154
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4017
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4017
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ines Rehbein. 2019. On the role of discourse relations in persuasive texts. In Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 144–154, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the role of discourse relations in persuasive texts (Rehbein, LAW 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4017.pdf