Discourse relations, such as cause-consequence or contrast relations, can be signalled in many different ways: ‘routine’ ways with classic discourse connectives or cue phrases such as because and as an example, and ‘creative’ ways with other lexical or non-lexical cues, such as grammatical structure. A considerable amount of research is concerned with connectives and their effects: Corpus-based work has provided insight into how connectives can be used, resulting in the creation of connective lexica in various languages (collected in Connective-Lex, Stede et al., 2019); experimental work has shown that connectives facilitate the processing of relations, but to different degrees, e.g., depending on the expectedness of the relation.

Compared to the fairly large body of literature on connectives, much less is known about non-connective signals. Interest in these signals has increased in recent years, evident by the release of the RST Signalling Corpus (Das & Taboada, 2018), which describes signals such as semantic, syntactic, and graphical features. There is early evidence that such signals, although less clear cues than connectives, do affect comprehension and processing. For example, Crible et al. (2021) show that syntactic parallelism facilitates the processing of contrastive relations, and that this effect is greater for non-native readers than for native readers.

List of Topics

Despite the considerable and growing attention, open questions remain relating to connective and non-connective signalling alike, as well as their interaction. The goal of our workshop is therefore to aggregate research addressing topics related to the following core questions:

• How are discourse relations signalled? How do we determine what counts as a signal?
• How do non-connective cues, as well as more traditional relational markers, contribute to the marking of discourse relations and affect production and comprehension?
• What are the differences in discourse marking across languages, modalities, genres, or individuals?

We welcome contributions from a wide range of methodologies and topics, including corpus-based and experimental work, and studies focusing on language acquisition or language change. We also invite submissions of work-in-progress projects that are projected to have results by March.

Submission Guidelines

We invite abstracts for a 20-minute presentation (+ 10 minutes discussion). Abstract should be max. 500 words (excluding references) and submitted in PDF. Please submit your abstract via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dgfsag6) by 15-08-2022.

Timelines

• Submission deadline: 22-08-2022
• Notification of acceptance: 01-09-2022
• Workshop: March 8-10 2023

Travel grants 

A limited number of travel grants of up to 500 Euro each are available for accepted contributions by DGfS members without/with low income.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to the organizers:

• Regina Zieleke, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen - regina.zieleke (at) uni-tuebingen.de
• Merel C.J. Scholman, Saarland University - m.c.j.scholman (at) coli.uni-saarland.de
• Jet Hoek, Radboud University Nijmegen - j.hoek (at) let.ru.nl