C06 - Prominence in subordinating rhetorical relations
What is subordination in discourse? First and foremost, it is a way to reduce the prominence of certain text spans, sentences or clauses, so they do not distract from the more central parts of the text. Subordinate material is intended to only make a local contribution to discourse. It holds the status of discourse topic for a limited time and always implies a possibility to return to the main topic of the discourse.
The project develops a formal discourse-semantic model that focusses on describing the aspects of discourse prominence related to the hierarchical structure of discourse created by subordination. Our concept of discourse structure is based on the notion of rhetorical relations – the functions of utterances in discourse in relation to one another, such as Elaboration, Explanation, Narration, Contrast, Parallel, etc. Our specific goal is to explain why certain rhetorical relations, such as Elaboration and Explanation, tend to establish subordination and lead to the relative reduction of the prominence of subordinate material, while others, e.g. Contrast and Narration, usually function as coordinating relations.
Team

PD Dr. Katja Jasinskaja
Principal Investigator C06
Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 4.08 E-mail: katja.jasinskaja(at)uni-koeln.de Phone: (+49) 221 470-89922 Web: PD Dr. Katja Jasinskaja

Yuting Li
Student assistant C06
Office: SFB, Luxemburger Str. 299, room 4.08 E-mail: yli31(at)uni-koeln.de Phone: (+49) 221 470-89921
Publications
To appear
- Jasinskaja, Katja & Elena Karagjosova. To appear. Rhetorical relations. In Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann & Thomas Ede Zimmermann (eds.), Companion to Semantics. Oxford: Wiley. preprint: pdf
- Jasinskaja, Katja & Radek Šimík. To appear. Slavonic free word order. In Jan Fellerer & Neil Bermel (eds.) Oxford Guide to the Slavonic Languages. Oxford University Press. preprint: pdf
2021
- Jasinskaja, Katja & Claudia Poschmann. 2021. Projection to the speaker: Non-restrictive relatives meet coherence relations. In Anke Holler, Katja Suckow & Israel de la Fuente (eds.), Information structuring in discourse, 141–162. Leiden: Brill. preprint: pdf
2019
- Rothkegel, Carina. 2019. Empirische Studien zur perspektivischen Interpretation indexikalischer Ausdrücke in indirekter Redewiedergabe. Master thesis. University of Cologne. pdf
2018
- Jasinskaja, Katja. 2018. Questions and goals in the structure of discourse. A new look at coherence relations. Kumulative Habilitation. pdf
- Jasinskaja, Katja & Claudia Poschmann. 2018. Attachment in syntax and discourse: Towards an explanation for the flexible scope of non-restrictive relatives. In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, SALT 28, 433–453. Cambridge MA: MIT.
2017
- Benz, Anton & Katja Jasinskaja. 2017. Questions under discussion: From sentence to discourse. Discourse Processes, 54(3). 177–186.
- Jasinskaja, Katja, Fabienne Salfner & Constantin Freitag. 2017. Discourse-level implicatures: A case for QUD. Discourse Processes, 54(3). 239–258.
Event organization
- Organization of the workshop "At-Issueness, Scope and Coherece", Universität zu Köln, held from 9th-10th July 2018.