Cognitive complexity and the linguistic marking of coherence relations: A parallel corpus study

Abstract

Coherence relations can be made linguistically explicit by means of connectives (e.g., but, because) or cue phrases (e.g., on the other hand, which is why), but can also be left implicit and conveyed through the juxtaposition of two clauses or sentences. However, it seems that not all relations are equally easy to reconstruct when they are implicit. In this paper, we explore which features of coherence relations make them more, or less, likely to be conveyed implicitly. We adopt the assumption that expected relations are more often implicit than relations that are not expected, and propose to determine a relation's expectedness using the notion of cognitive complexity. We test our hypotheses by means of a parallel corpus study, in which we analyze the translations of explicit English coherence relations from the Europarl Direct corpus into four target languages: Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. We find that cognitive complexity indeed influences the linguistic marking of coherence relations, and that this does not vary between the languages in our corpus. In addition, we find that a relation's relational and syntactic dependency also influences its linguistic marking, but that these measures are not completely independent of relation type.