Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Rhetorical Relations

Rhetorical relations (RR) hold between sentences and clauses in a coherent discourse and may reflect the contentful relations between events or situations described (e.g. cause, temporal succession), or the presentational strategy pursued by the speaker in order to produce a certain effect on the hearer (e.g. contrast, evidence). RR can be encoded explicitly in the text by special linguistic means (discourse particles, intonation) or remain implicit, in which case they are *inferred* by the hearer on the basis of general pragmatic considerations. The interaction between the linguistic processes and the general inference mechanisms involved in establishing RR, as well as the formal modelling of this interaction is a relevant issue of cross-linguistic research between language and logic. The course will introduce students to the phenomenon of RR in written and spoken language and discuss the major formal approaches to their inference (Abduction, SDRT) culminating in a recent reduction of RR to general pragmatics, using ideas from Optimality Theory.