Means used by discourse addressees for the identification of coherence relations not signaled by discourse markers

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present other means of signaling rhetorical relations (or coherence relations) rather than connectives used by discourse addressees to identify the relations. The investigation, based on Rhetorical Structure Theory, was held by the presentation of ten excerpts to university professors in order to verify if the rhetorical relation held between the texts spans that comprise the excerpt could be identifi ed. Most of the relations were successfully identifi ed by the informants, and the signals used for the identifi cation were formal, phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, textual and cognitive.