The Role Of Discourse Relations In Persuasive Texts

This paper investigates the use of explicitly signalled discourse relations in persuasive texts. We present a corpus study where we control for speaker and topic and show that the distribution of different discourse connectives varies considerably across different discourse settings. While this variation can be explained by genre differences, we also observe variation regarding the distribution of discourse relations across different settings. This variation cannot be explained by genre differences. We argue that the differences regarding the use of discourse relations reflects different strategies of persuasion and that these might be due to audience design.