Contextualising Contrastive Discourse Relations: Evidence from Single-Authored and Co-constructed Texts

Abstract

This paper compares the linguistic realisation of contrastive discourse relations in single-authored and co-constructed texts produced in an experimental setting in which participants were asked to produce a well-formed argumentative text based on a skeleton text reduced to minimal propositional information while still containing the original argumentative sequential organisation and default configuration of events. The goal was to understand the role of context – linguistic context (or: co-text) and social context - in discourse production, in discourse processing and in the construal of discourse coherence. The study is methodologically compositional across functional approaches to discourse grammar, discourse representation, and discourse pragmatics. The results of the experiment show that co-constructed and single-authored texts utilise a pool of contrastive discourse connectives with the single-authored texts additionally referring to and entextualising linguistic and social context, embedding contrastive contributions accordingly.