---
title: "Lexical marking of discourse relations - some — Soria 1998"
description: "The paper asks when speakers and writers choose to make a discourse relation explicit with a connective, and how much readers rely on such markers."
authors: ["Claudia Soria", "Giacomo Ferrari"]
year: 1998
venue: "Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W98-0306/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/soria-1998-lexical-marking-discourse-relations-some/"
---
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# Lexical marking of discourse relations - some experimental findings

**Authors:** [Claudia Soria](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/claudia-soria/), Giacomo Ferrari · **Year:** 1998 · **Venue:** Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W98-0306/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W98-0306.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3087933187)

**Citations:** 24 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [6](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper asks when speakers and writers choose to make a discourse relation explicit with a connective, and how much readers rely on such markers. Instead of adopting one existing taxonomy, the authors group relations from Hobbs, Mann and Thompson, and Sanders et al. into three broad cognitive classes: additive, consequential and contrastive. Experiment 1 tested comprehension. Ten undergraduates freely labelled the relation between 72 pairs of Italian text segments drawn from a multi-genre written corpus. Each pair appeared either in its original form or with the connective removed. Experiment 2 examined production by comparing how often relations were lexically marked in spoken and written versions of narratives. Removing connectives lowered recognition for every class, most sharply for contrastive relations and least for additive ones. In production, contrastive relations were almost always marked in both modes, while additive ones were seldom marked. Speech used more connectives overall. The results suggest that lexical marking is partly governed by relation type and medium, which matters for discourse analysis and text generation.

## Key points
- The stimuli comprised 72 Italian segment pairs: 21 additive, 27 consequential and 24 contrastive. Each subject saw half of the items with the connective and half without, with the assignment counterbalanced across subjects.
- Correct recognition with vs. without a connective:
  - additive: 72.6% vs. 64.3%
  - consequential: 88.9% vs. 60.2%
  - contrastive: 83.3% vs. 42.7%
- Without a connective, many misread relations were confused with the additive class. Such confusions reached 27.8% for consequential items and 31.2% for contrastive ones.
- Share of relations marked by a connective in spoken vs. written narratives:
  - contrastive: 95.3% vs. 91.7%
  - consequential: 59.7% vs. 43.4%
  - additive: roughly 20–25%, rising slightly in writing (+3.2 points)
- The authors conclude that contrastive relations effectively require a connective, which they attribute to higher cognitive complexity. The overall relative use of the three classes was essentially the same in speech and writing.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/discourse-analysis/)

## Cited by

Cited by

6 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

- [Learning Connective-based Word Representations for Implicit Discourse Relation Identification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/braud-2016-learning-connective-based-word-representations/)
- [Modelling the Usage of Discourse Connectives as Rational Speech Acts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/yung-2016-modelling-usage-discourse-connectives-as/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{soria1998lexical,
  title = {{Lexical marking of discourse relations - some experimental findings}},
  author = {Soria, Claudia and Ferrari, Giacomo},
  booktitle = {Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers},
  year = {1998},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W98-0306/}
}
```

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## References

13 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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