Annotation Guidelines for Rhetorical Structure

Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988, Taboada and Mann, 2006) postulates that a coherent text can be characterized by means of a tree structure whose leaves are the “elementary discourse units” (henceforth: EDUs), and whose internal nodes are labelled with a coherence relation. The theory proposes a list of about 25 such relations, which may be said to hold between two EDUs or (recursively) between larger spans of text. With most of the relations, the two units are not of equal “weight”. Instead, one of them is said to play the central role of this local constellation, while the other one has merely a supportive function. The former unit is called the nucleus of this (instance of a) coherence relation; the latter is its satellite.