Kikuko NISHINA, Yooko SASAGAWA, and Mitsuru DOI
International Students Center,
Tokyo Institute of Technology
2-12-1 Ookayama Meguro-ku Tokyo 152 Japan
We have made 6 new video-recordings (360 minutes) of post graduate seminars
in the engineering department at TIT in addition to 10 video-recordings which
were made last year. Through observation of the video-recordings, this paper
analyses cohesion and coherence of seminar dialogues.
In order to analyze spoken text, we have to treat it in a formal way
because sentences are not uttered in the same way as written text due
to ill-formed and imperfect sentences and so on.
We try to observe collocation of words in the spoken text focusing on
paraphrased parts of the dialogues in order to find cohesion in the spoken
discourse. On the other hand, we note functional words such as conjugations
and demonstratives in the context of meta markers of coherence.
We define seminar dialogue as a mutual understanding process for reaching
for new information or knowledge, which is different from idle chatter or
strategic dialogues for sales talks.
A speaker often uses paraphrases as rhetorical strategies, when he wants to
persuade the audience. He also uses them to repair communication breakdown for
the following reasons:
(1) Physical reasons of both speakers and listeners (the handicapped;
difficulty in hearing or speaking)
(2) Language abilities of both speakers and listeners (children vs adults,
foreigners vs native speakers)
(3) Background knowledge of both speakers and listeners (experts vs
nonexperts)
(4) Reasoning ability of both speakers and listeners.
In this context, a paraphrase is defined as replacing words or phrases in
other words or phrases. We also define cohesion as word relationships within
the text and coherence as word relationships with reference to background
knowledge (the world).
We observe the following patterns of cohesion within paraphrases in dialogues
of the data:
(a) substitutions (b) ellipsis (c) reference (d) synonymy (e)
hyponymy (f) metonymy (g) syneodoche (h) antonymy.
Those words which are paraphrased should be close to others in the sense of
notional relationships. On this premise, we use a notional dictionary
produced by EDR (Japan Electronic Dictionary Research Institute Ltd.) to
measure the distance between words and the paraphrased words. We also try to
show notional network maps.
On the other hand, we observe the structure of coherence by dividing
functional words as discourse markers into additives, adversative, causal,
temporal, exemplifying and summing up.
From this analysis we conclude the following:
(1) In analyzing spoken discourse, we have to use different methods from
written text. It seems a useful method to measure collocations of cohesion
in the text by using a notional dictionary, although we need more data for
measuring the distance between words within the text.
(2) We can observe spoken discourse from different viewpoints such as cohesion
and coherence. Cohesion shows collocations of words or notional relationships
within a discourse: coherence shows logical structures.
The following topics form the basis of further research:
(1) We will collect more data for analyzing in order to measure notional
distances with a notional dictionary.
(2) We will form a descriptive rhetorical structure model according to notional
relationships using computational algorithms.
(3) We will form protocols of discourse structure at seminars (comparing with
idle chat, strategic talks etc.)
Keywords: coherence, collocation, background knowledge, notional dictionary, discourse marker