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<Paper uid="W98-0305">
  <Title>On classifying connectives and coherence relations</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper tackles the methodological question of how coherence relations and their surface cues, e.g. causal connectives, may be categorised into different discourse domains.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this context, the central issue is the need for explicit and objective criteria that can be applied by different analysts to all kinds of natural texts. Strengths and weaknesses of different methods that are currently used in corpus studies are passed in review.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Introduction In this paper, I would like to address a methodological question that starts from the following observation: There is a growing number of corpus studies in the area of the use of coherence relations and discourse markers in natural texts. Most of these studies try to establish a relationship between the coherence relations found in the text and the discourse markers used to signal them linguistically, very often inter-clausal connectives (Degand 1996, 1998; Grote, Lenke &amp; Stede 1997; Knott 1996; Mann &amp; Thompson 1992; Oversteegen 1997; Pit, Pander Maat &amp; Sanders 1997; Pander Maat &amp; Sanders 1995, Sanders 1997). However, the results of these studies are hardly ever straightforward to compare. The main reason for this is that the methods used to classify both the coherence relations and their linguistic markers are very often divergent and in the best cases only partially overlapping. So, in order to enable comparison of the different studies, there is a need for clear and explicit classification criteria. In this paper, I will try to set out a number of such (operationalisable) elements that could function as tools in the categorisation task. The goal will be reached if the categorisation criteria are formulated in such an explicit way that they can be applied by different analysts to all kinds of natural texts.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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