Discourse relations: Genre-specific degrees of overtness in argumentative and narrative discourse

Based on a contrastive approach that compares the argumentative genre of editorial with the narrative genre of personal narrative across two production modes, single-authored data and data elicited in an editing-based task, this paper examines the impact of genre on the realizations of discourse relations, paying particular attention to the argumentative genre and its preferential realizations of Contrast, Continuation, Elaboration and Explanation/Result. Discourse relations are conceived of as sociocognitive constructs that are encoded in coherence strands and may additionally be signalled overtly with discourse connectives, metacomments and/or pragmatic word order. Quantitative analyses of single-authored and co-constructed data reveal systematic differences in the variation of degrees of overtness between editorials and personal narratives. In the argumentative genre, Explanation, Continuation and Comment tend to be realized with a lower degree of overtness, Elaboration with a higher degree of overtness. Contrast is realized overtly throughout the data, irrespective of genre.