An argument for definitional adequacy of RESULT and NARRATION

Abstract

Discourse relations link two different discourse units into a compound unit, and it is the presence of such relations that gives a discourse coherence. For example, the relations RESULT and NARRATION are responsible for the perceived "narrative progression" of the events described in the discourse. Building on Hobbs (1985) and Kehler (2002), we use the definitions of RESULT and NARRATION to derive constraints that pertain to the internal structure of discourse units, and we argue that the plausibility of these constraints lends a new type of support for the definitions that we propose.