The overall markedness of discourse relations

Abstract

Discourse relations can be categorized as continuous or discontinuous in the hypothesis of continuity (Murray, 1997), with continuous relations expressing normal succession of events in discourse such as temporal, spatial or causal. Asr and Demberg (2013) propose a markedness measure to test the prediction that discontinuous relations may have more unambiguous connectives, but restrict the markedness calculation to relations with explicit connectives only. This paper extends their measure to explicit and implicit relations and shows that results from this extension better fit the continuity hypothesis predictions both for the English Penn Discourse (Prasad et al., 2008) and the Chinese Discourse (Zhou and Xue, 2015) Treebanks.