Both on and under the Surface of Discourse: Tagged Corpora for the Functional Description of Conjunctive Language

This paper reports an eight-stage procedure for tagging small specialised corpora with logical relations, grounded in the coding of two corpora of argumentative writing – one learner corpus, and one expert corpus. The tagset was developed out of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Tagging involved adjusting mark-up added by the RST Tool tree diagram program to produce a corpus with cocoa tags easily searchable with KWIC concordancing software. Results show disambiguation of form-function relationships in conjunction and a wide range of types of conjunctive language. Potential further applications in research and teaching are discussed.