This chapter gives an introduction to the subject area of rhetorical relations by reconsidering the fundamental question of how many and which rhetorical relations exist and by what kinds of criteria they are defined. It then presents a case study on the distinction between subordinating and coordinating rhetorical relations, discusses the linguistic motivation for this, and attempts a novel definition of the notion of discourse‐structural subordination.

Our goal is to improve the contextual appropriateness of spoken output in a dialogue system. We explore the use of the information state to determine the information structure of system utterances. We concentrate on the realization of information structure by intonation. We present the results of evaluating the contextual appropriateness of varied system output produced with a text-to-speech synthesis system that supports intonation annotation.

No abstract

The paper investigates the origins of the German/Dutch particle toch/doch) in the hope of shedding light on a puzzle with respect to doch/toch and to shed some light on two theoretical issues. The puzzle is the nearly opposite meaning of the stressed and unstressed versions of the particle which cannot be accounted for in standard theories of the meaning of stress. One theoretical issue concerns the meaning of stress: whether it is possible to reduce the semantic contribution of a stressed item to the meaning of the item and the meaning of stress. The second issue is whether the complex use of a particle like doch/toch can be seen as an instance of spread or whether it has to be seen as having a core meaning which is differentiated by pragmatics operating in different contexts. We use the etymology of doch and doch as to+u+h (that+ question marker+ emphatic marker) to argue for an origin as a question tag checking a hearer opinion. Stress on the tag indicates an opposite opinion (of the common ground or the speaker) and this sets apart two groups of uses spreading in different directions. This solves the puzzle, indicates that the assumption of spread is useful and offers a subtle correction of the interpretation of stress. While stress always means contrast with a contrasting item, if the particle use is due to spread, it is not guaranteed that the unstressed particle has a corresponding use (or inversely).

The paper presents a corpus-based information-structural analysis of the German discourse particles aber and auch in the so-called post-initial position, i.e. between the pre-field constituent and the finite verb in main clauses. Based on corpus data, I argue that aber and auch in this position mark the border between the focus and the background of the sentence that hosts them. By doing this, they essentially contribute to identifying relevant alternatives involved in focus interpretation and discourse interpretation in general. In this way, the placement of particles in postinitial position facilitates interpretation by providing processing instructions to the reader/hearer and by ruling out ambiguities. The analysis argues thus against existing accounts of the discourse function of post-initial particles in terms of indicating association with topic and topic shift.