The Classification of Coherence Relations and their Linguistic Markers: An Exploration of Two Languages

... In this paper, both questions are addressed: we outline a conception of relations as modelling psychological constructs used by readers and writers, and suggest how a limited set of categories of coherence relations can be identified. We relate two independent methods for investigating relations, one drawing mainly on psycholinguistic experiments on Dutch speaking subjects, the other starting from a study of the `cue phrases' used to signal relations in English text. Both approaches lead to classifications of relations and cue phrases. We examine to what extent these classifications converge---and to what extent they accord with the psychologically motivated classification---in a comparative study of a set of cue phrases in English and Dutch. Interesting similarities are noted on both counts