The notion that a text is coherent in virtue of the `relations' whichholdbetween the elements of that text has become fairly common currency, both in the study of discourse coherence and in the field of text generation. The set of relations proposed in Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson [16] has had particular influence in both of these fields. But the widespread adoption of `relational' terminology belies a certain amount of confusion about the relational constructs themselves: no two theorists use exactly the same set of relations# and often there seems no motivation for introducing a new relation beyond considerations of descriptive adequacy or engineering expedience.

This paper outlines a number of problems with RST's elaboration relation, and discusses a new model of text structure that results from leaving this relation out of the set of relations. In this model, trees of interclausal/intersentential relations account for the local coherence of a text, while its global coherence is accounted for by a separate device: global focus. 1 Introduction Many theories of discourse propose that a coherent text is one whose clauses, sentences and text spans (or perhaps the propositions expressed by these text units) stand in particular relations to one another. The basic motivation in these theories stems from the observation that a text is more than a sequence of independent units: whether a particular unit makes sense in a given discourse depends not only on this unit by itself, but also on its relationship with the other units in the discourse. This claim has been spelled out in many dierent ways, but there are two requirements that any such theor...

The notion that a text is coherent in virtue of the `relations' which hold between the elements of that text has become fairly common currency, both in the study of discourse coherence and in the field of text generation. The set of relations proposed in Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson [14]) has had particular influence in both of these fields. But the widespread adoption of `relational' terminology belies a certain amount of confusion about the relational constructs themselves: no two theorists use exactly the same set of relations; and often there seems no motivation for introducing a new relation beyond considerations of descriptive adequacy or engineering expedience. To alleviate this confusion, it is useful to think of relations not just as constructs with descriptive or operational utility, but as constructs with psychological reality, modelling real cognitive processes in readers and writers. This conception of rhetorical relations suggests a methodology for delin...

This article presents a generalized system of image--text relations which applies to different genres of multimodal discourse in which images and texts co-occur. It combines two kinds of relations -- the relative status of images and text, and how they relate to one another in terms of logico--semantics. Every instance of an image--text combination in the data sample is described by a selection of features from the system. The units of images and text between which the relations obtain are identified and the realizations of the logico--semantic and status relations are specified, both for the human analyst and a machine. Two application scenarios are discussed. The system should be useful for distinguishing between image--text relations for (genuinely) new and old media.

For successful written communication, the writer not only must engage the readers’