Discourse and Cohesion in Expository Text

This paper discusses tile role of disconrse in expository text; text which typically comprises published scholarly papers, textbooks, proceedings of conferences, and other highly stylized documents. Our purpose is to examine the extent to which those discourse-related phenomena that generally assist the analysis of dialogue text -where speaker, hearer, and speech-act information are more actively inwllved in the identification of plans and goals can be used to help with the analysis of expository text. In particular, we make the optimistic assmnption that expository text is strongly connected; i.e., that all adjacent pairs of clauses in such a text are connected by 'cohesion markers , ' both explicit and implicit. We investigate the impact that this assmnption may have on the depth of understanding that can be achieved, rite nnderlying semantic structures, aud the supporting lcnowledge base for the analysis. An application of this work in designin~g the M-based machine translation nmdel, TRANSLATOR, is discussed in NIRENBURG ET AL (1986) which appears elsewhere in this volume.