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About the Project

Nau mai haere mai
The aim of this research project is to compare the signalling of discourse relations in written and spoken te reo Māori at different historical periods and by native and non-native speakers and to develop a fully searchable database of spoken and written documents in te reo Māori using Greenstone Digital Library software.

Discourse relations has enjoyed a large international following especially in computational linguistics, where models of discourse relations are often used to plan coherent text and to parse the structure of texts (Grosz & Sinder, 1986, 1990; Knott, 1996, 2000; Knott & Dale, 1996; Knott & Sanders, 1998; Taboada & Mann, 2006a & b). They are central to Construction Grammar (Fillmore, 1988), Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin, 1996, 2001) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson, 1986, 1988).

In spite of that, there have been very few studies of te reo Māori that include any reference at all to discourse relations. The few works relating to te reo Māori that do make reference to discourse relations are: Crombie, Bruce and Houia-Roberts (2005); Crombie and Houia (2001); Crombie and Houia-Roberts (2001); Houia (2001a & b); Houia-Roberts (2003; 2004a& b), Whaanga (2006). This project aims to add to the limited information in this area that is currently available.

References
Crombie, W., & Houia, W. (2001). The rhetorical organization of Māori discourse: An illustration. Journal of Maori and Pacific Development, 2(1), 32-49.
Crombie, W., & Houia-Roberts, N. (2001). The rhetorical organisation of discourse: Language revitalisation and the question of authenticity. Journal of Maori and Pacific Development, 2(2), 57-73.
Crombie, W., Bruce, I., & Houia-Roberts, N. (2005). The arguing genre and the explaining genre: A comparison in terms of discourse relational analyses of texts written in English and texts written in Maori. Journal of Maori and Pacific Development, 6(1), 27-33.
Fillmore, C. J. (1988). The mechanisms of construction grammar. In S. Axmaker, A. Jaisser & H. Singmaster (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkley Linguistics Society (pp. 35-55). Berkley: Berkley Linguistics Society.
Grosz, B. J., & Sidner, C. L. (1986). Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12(3), 175-204.
Grosz, B. J., & Sidner, C. L. (1990). Plans for discourse. In P. R. Cohen, J. L. Morgan & M. E. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in Communication (pp. 417-444). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Houia, W. (2001a). Inter-propositional semantic relations and semantic relational encoding in written discourse in Māori: an investigation. Unpublished M.Phil., The University of Waikato, Hamilton.
Houia, W. (2001b). Looking at relationships between propositions in Māori language. Journal of Maori and Pacific Development, 2(2), 39-56.
Houia-Roberts, N. (2003). Genre and authentic written discourse in Māori and their relevance to the education of students in upper secondary and tertiary Māori-medium educational settings. Journal of Maori and Pacific Development, 4(2), 65-99.
Houia-Roberts, N. (2004a). An analysis of the rhetorical organisation of selected authentic Māori texts belonging to the text-types argument and information report. Journal of Maori and Pacific Development, 5(1), 2-34.
Houia-Roberts, N. (2004b). An examination of genres and text-types in written Māori discourse: Analysis and pedagogic implications. Unpublished Ph.D. (Applied linguistics), University of Waikato, Hamilton.
Knott, A. (1996). A data-driven methodology for motivating a set of discourse relations. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
Knott, A. (2000). An algorithmic framework for specifying the semantics of discourse relations. Computational Intelligence, 16(4), 501-510.
Knott, A., & Dale, R. (1996). Choosing a set of coherence relations for text generation: A data-driven approach. In G. Adorni & M. Zock (Eds.), Trends in Natural Language Generation: an Artificial Intelligence Perspective (pp. 47-67). Berlin: Springer.
Knott, A., & Sanders, T. (1998). The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages. Journal of Pragmatics, 30(2), 135-175.
Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1986). Relational propositions in discourse. Discourse Processes, 9, 57-90.
Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8(3), 243-281.
Taboada, M., & Mann, W. C. (2006a). Applications of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Discourse Studies, 8(4), 567-588.
Taboada, M., & Mann, W. C. (2006b). Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies, 8(3), 423-459.
Van Valin, R. D. (1996). Role and Reference Grammar. In K. Brown & J. Miller (Eds.), Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories (pp. 281-294). Oxford: Pergamon.
Van Valin, R. D. (2001). Introduction to syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whaanga, J. P. (2006). Case roles/ relations and discourse relations: A Māori language-based perspective. Unpublished Ph.D., University of Waikato, Hamilton.