Ma(r)king concessions in English and German

Abstract

In order to generate cohesive discourse, many of the relations holding between text segments need to be signalled to the reader by means of cue words, or {\em discourse markers}. Programs usually do this in a simplistic way, e.g., by using one marker per relation. In reality, however, language offers a very wide range of markers from which informed choices should be made. In order to account for the variety and to identify the parameters governing the choices, detailled linguistic analyses are necessary. We worked with one area of discourse relations, the Concession family, identified its underlying pragmatics and semantics, and undertook extensive corpus studies to examine the range of markers used in both English and German. On the basis of an initial classification of these markers, we propose a generation model for producing bilingual text that can incorporate marker choice into its overall decision framework.