In this chapter, our main objective is to provide a succinct description of four leading models of discourse: Rhetorical Structure Theory, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the Penn Discourse Treebank project, and the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations. We present the main goals of each model, and discuss their advantages and limitations. We also list their specificities compared to other models, and analyze the main differences between them. We focus more specifically on the aspects of these models that have to do with the description of discourse relations. For each model, we present the type of research to which it has been applied, and the data that have been produced in the form of annotated corpora. As we will see, all these models have been used to annotate large corpora with discourse relations. An important issue is therefore to establish mappings between the relations annotated in each of them, in order to compare data from one corpus to the others. At the end the chapter, we discuss various options for comparing annotations across models.

This chapter aims to analyze the variation in use and functions of a broad bottom–up selection of discourse markers across four languages from different typological families, namely French and Spanish (Romance), English (Germanic), and Polish (Slavic). Such an endeavor requires that we not only overcome issues of definition and delimitation of the discourse marker category but also design an annotation model encompassing their full functional spectrum, in the perspective of spoken discourse analysis. Our study follows a corpus–based multilingual annotation scheme for functions of (spoken) discourse markers. The functional taxonomy distinguishes between four domains that may be combined with fifteen functions. This taxonomy with two independent levels has been applied to spoken unplanned dialogues in the four languages. The annotations were extracted for contrastive analyses of distribution and variation of discourse markers and their functions. The results indicate that the multilingual annotation scheme may be applied validly to the four different languages. This makes it possible to uncover both similarities and divergences in the functional and semantic distribution of discourse markers. This multidimensional and multilingual approach to discourse markers offers a fine–grained portrait of the variation and of the polyfunctionality of this category across typological families.