ITRI-99-08 State of the Art Report on Discourse Markers and Relations

machine can be interpreted together as representing a list of items. (Maier and Hovy, 1991) The next class of relations are referred to as interpersonal relations. Each relation in this class has its own specific effect on the reader. For example, to convince or motivate the reader to do something. They are, therefore, similar to Mann and Thompson’s (Mann and Thompson, 1988) presentational relations. However, 4This distinction is based upon Halliday and Hasan’s (Halliday and Hasan, 1976) three metafunctions of language which are used within their systemic-functional linguistics framework to describe a wider range of phenomena in addition to discourse relations. 5The fact thatMann and Thompson do not account for discourse markers in their theory is discussed further in section 6