While the use of narrative elements in educational texts seems to be an adequate means to enhance students’ engagement and comprehension, we know little about how and to what extent these elements are used in the present-day educational practice. In this quantitative corpus-based analysis, we chart how and when narrative elements are used in current Dutch educational texts (N=999). While educational texts have traditionally been considered prime exemplars of expository texts, we show that the distinction between the expository and narrative genre is not that strict in the educational domain: prototypical narrative elements – particularized events, experiencing characters, and landscapes of consciousness – occur in 45% of the corpus’ texts. Their distribution varies between school subjects: while specific events, specific people, and their experiences are often at the heart of the to-be-learned information in history texts, narrativity is less present in the educational content of biology and geography texts. Instead publishers employ narrative-like strategies to make these texts more concrete and imaginable, such as the addition of fictitious characters and representative entities.

This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian, which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres.

The Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations (Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992) was originally proposed as a set of cognitively plausible primitives to order coherence relations, but is also increasingly used as a discourse annotation scheme. This paper provides an overview of new CCR distinctions that have been proposed over the years, summarizes the most important discussions about the operationalization of the primitives, and introduces a new distinction (disjunction) to the taxonomy to improve the descriptive adequacy of CCR. In addition, it reflects on the use of the CCR as an annotation scheme in practice. The overall aim of the paper is to provide an overview of state-of-the-art CCR for discourse annotation that can form, together with the original 1992 proposal, a comprehensive starting point for anyone interested in annotating discourse using CCR.

Over the last decennia, annotating discourse coherence relations has gained increasing interest of the linguistics research community. Because of the complexity of coherence relations, there is no agreement on an annotation standard. Current annotation methods often lack a systematic order of coherence relations. In this article, we investigate the usability of the cognitive approach to coherence relations, developed by Sanders et al. (1992, 1993), for discourse annotation. The theory proposes a taxonomy of coherence relations in terms of four cognitive primitives. In this paper, we first develop a systematic, step-wise annotation process. The reliability of this annotation scheme is then tested in an annotation experiment with non-trained, non-expert annotators. An implicit and explicit version of the annotation instruction was created to determine whether the type of instruction influences the annotator agreement. The results show that two of the four primitives, polarity and order of the segments, can be applied reliably by non-trained annotators. The other two primitives, basic operation and source of coherence, are more problematic. Participants using the explicit instruction show higher agreement on the primitives than participants used the implicit instruction. These results are comparable to agreement statistics of other discourse corpora annotated by trained, expert annotators. Given that non-trained, non-expert annotators show similar amounts of agreement, these results indicate that the cognitive approach to coherence relations is a promising method for annotating discourse.