The Contribution of Coherence Relations to Understanding Paratactic Forms of Communication in Social Media Comment Sections

Overview & Synopsis

In this article, our aim is to explore how coherence relations can be leveraged to identify discursive strategies, in particular, parataxis; that generate pragmatic-stylistic effects. This is done by making use of computational linguistics tools to analyze immigration-related discourse within the SFU Opinion and Comments (SOCC) corpus. Within our methodology, an NLP-based discourse parser is first used for the automated extraction and identification of coherence relations within comment sections. This information is then subjected to qualitative analysis, aiming to identify paratactic forms of communication that can be understood as typical formations reflecting a larger grammar of coherence relation for social media related content.