Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations

Abstract

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 the use of connectives provided further evidence for the psychological salience of the taxonomic primitives and their relevance to the understanding of coherence relations.