Abstract
An overview is given of some main positions with respect to rhetorical relations with an emphasis on the open linguistic, philosophical and computational issues and the possibilities for progress. The first part tries to motivate the relations, after which applications to various phenomena and areas are considered. The paper tries to look at rhetorical relations as a single field to which the various models have made important contributions. In this view Rhetorical Structure Theory has discovered the relations, the Linguistic Discourse Model has made grammar out of them and Interpretation by Abduction and Structured Discourse Representation Theory are models of how to recognise them. The proponents of these models as well as many others have analysed the relation between rhetorical relations and phenomena like information structure, pronoun resolution, topic questions, presupposition and temporal reference, have analysed rhetorical relations from various perspectives and developed annotation schemata for them. There is no attempt to treat any approach comprehensively or to choose between approaches.
