The ontological dimension of human rights in the digital domain concerns its theoretical foundations and the content of human rights norms. Based on the Aristotelian theory of epistemology, this represents the side of objective reality. The non-coherence theory of digital human rights explores the ontology of human rights at various levels of generality. Eight justification models articulated for the human rights offline domain will be applied to digital human rights. If the implicitness of human rights online were to originate from this same online domain, it could no longer be viewed through non-coherence theory, as it would represent an entirely independent and separate paradigm of meanings. Since the online world is determined by technical possibilities, we can formulate a hypothesis that the gap between the implicit and explicit dimensions of human rights online are by default narrowing since these elements of implicitness, which cannot be realised online, are simply rejected.

In this chapter, we first introduce the questions of when and how children start using connectives and discourse relations during their first years of life. We will see more specifically that mastering the complex form-function mappings involved in the understanding of many connectives is a complex task for young children. In addition, we will present research investigating school-age children’s comprehension of connectives, and show that it is only around the end of their primary school years that they fully understand frequent connectives. We will explore the causes of these difficulties, and discuss the differences between various connectives and discourse relations. We will then move on to other studies analyzing the way older children understand connectives, and see that their acquisition is not fully in place after primary school years, as teenagers keep developing their competence with connectives. Finally, we will briefly discuss the acquisition of connectives and discourse relations by children suffering from linguistic or cognitive impairments such as SLI and autism.

The argument of non-coherence can be useful for explaining two principally different approaches about the interrelationship between constitutional principles originating from the offline reality and their applicability in the online domain. The first says that the constitutional ideas of the digital domain originate from the offline domain, and the second says that they do not, their origin being from inside the online domain in isolation from the offline. The process of the transposition of human rights law from one domain to another, including constitutional principles, has three stages. The first has to do with the reasons for such a transposition. The second stage is the emergence of ideas and subsequent discourse saying that something in human rights law and/or practice has to be changed in order to provide adequate protection online. The third stage of the transposition of offline fundamental rights to the online domain is the acceptance of new rights or principles, or conversely, the rejection of claims due to the absence of their necessity.

This monograph is about the change in meaning and scope of human rights rules, principles, ideas and concepts, and the interrelationships and related actors, on moving from the physical domain into the online domain. The transposition into the digital reality can alter the meaning of well-established offline human rights to a wider or narrower extent; it can turn positivity into negativity and vice versa. The digital human rights realm has different layers of complexity in comparison with the offline realm.

In this chapter, we discuss the way people read, remember and understand discourse, depending on the type of relations that link discourse segments together. We also illustrate the role of connectives and other discourse signals as elements guiding readers’ interpretation. Throughout the chapter, we review empirical evidence from experiments that involve various methodologies such as offline comprehension tasks, self-paced reading, eye-tracking and event related potentials. One of the major findings is that not all relations are processed and remembered in the same way. It seems that causal relations play a special role for creating coherence in discourse, as they are processed more quickly and remembered better. Conversely, because they are highly expected, causal relations benefit less from the presence of connectives compared to discontinuous relations like concession and confirmation. Finally, research shows that in their native language, speakers are able to take advantage of all sorts of connectives for discourse processing, even those restricted to the written mode, and those that are ambiguous.

Non-coherence theory says the boundaries of traditional fundamental rights either become broader or narrower once transposed into the digital context, and this has also been shown previously. There are two images which at first sight appear almost the opposite of one another. The first reflects almost total freedom of expression unrestrained in practice, and the second almost the total absence of such freedom due to e-technologies which have the function of transparency and perpetuating everything which has been recorded or done. The first is a feature of social media and the second of blockchain technologies. These images may seem incompatible but are additionally explainable through the proportionality deficit paradox. Proportionality as a human rights instrument becomes distorted and weakened in the digital domain. The fragmentation stems from the loss of its holistic capacity to be applied anywhere relative rights collide online. The distortion means a breakage of the link between the outcome and the proportionality principle. The concept of proportionality between online and offline human rights domains exhibits wide non-coherence.

There are several theoretical frameworks that may be useful when approaching the question of whether new human rights claims have emerged in the digital domain. The chapter relies on three: Phil Alston’s quality control doctrine, H. L. Hart’s seminal categorisation of rights into primary and secondary and finally, the universality and abstractness decrease thesis. The chapter puts forward the weakness of connection thesis from analysis of social media companies’ community standards. Network rules of operation are often highly specific and have a weak connection to generally accepted human rights values and principles. This appears to be a common feature of the published rules of operation on social media networks. One may say here that human rights rhetoric and normativity lose their promise of being problem-solvers in the digital domain. Here non-coherence is clear. And it leaves open the question of whether something else has taken over the functionality of human rights.

In this chapter, we first present the extent of cross-linguistic differences in the uses of discourse connectives and relations, and discuss their implications for theories of discourse. We make a distinction between discourse relations, that seem to exist in all languages and their mapping onto specific connectives that is most of the time language-specific. We also present the kind of data that can be used to perform contrastive studies, emphasizing their advantages and limitations. Connectives are also used quite differently across different genres within the same language. These differences are particularly evident between spoken and written genres. We present the variations linked to genres in this chapter, and underline the necessity to develop more cross-linguistic studies that are also varied in terms of genres. Results from corpus studies comparing languages or genres have increasingly been used as input for experimental research. We discuss in particular how observations about connective usage across genres has been important for studies analyzing discourse processing, as well as first and second language acquisition

The take-away message from this book is quite simple: studying connectives and discourse relations matters because they represent cornerstone elements of discourse coherence. Throughout the book, our aim has been to illustrate the wide variety of research produced over the past decades on these two central notions. We have seen that although both concepts are intrinsically related, they cannot be entirely merged. Discourse relations can be conveyed in the absence of connectives through simple juxtaposition, and connectives can in many cases be used to convey more than one discourse relation depending on context.

This chapter contains views expressed by eighteen human rights academics in response to two questions: what in your view are the three most influential ideas put forward during the last ten years on the topic of digital human rights? What in your view are the two or three most significant challenges related to digital human rights which necessitate conceptualisation from academia? As a generalisation, the following was concluded. The academic discourse on digital human rights takes non-coherence as an implicit condition. This theory will turn the implicit assumption into an explicit condition. This explicit condition needs to be applied to several concepts of the highest importance, pointed out the academics: digital constitutionalism, digital democracy, overlapping human rights systems and the typology of digital human rights law development.

Building on the analogy from quantum mechanics, we can ask whether certain human rights exist in a shared state. This would mean, for instance, whether the right to privacy exists in a shared state with the right to freedom of expression. Or, whether the right to reputation – leaving aside the issue whether such a self-standing right can be justified – exists in a shared state with the right of access to information. If the premise of such a shared state is correct, then it would follow that change in the scope and meaning of one right (particle) in this shared state leads to a simultaneous change in the opposite direction in the other right (particle). After transposition into a new domain, the features of a human rights idea, or characteristics of some offline traditional right, may appear in a higher spectrum than in the traditional setting. We notice wide variance between the meaning of freedom of expression offline and online, since offline it can rarely be justified as an absolute right, whereas online practice shows a duality: the parallel possibility of relativity and absoluteness.

In this chapter, we start by defining and illustrating the notions of discourse relations and connectives. We will see that even though the role of discourse connectives is to make discourse relations explicit in discourse, their use is not necessary for a discourse relation to be communicated. Conversely, connectives are not always associated with a specific discourse relation: many of them can convey various relations depending on the context. Another goal of this chapter is to situate discourse relations and connectives within the more general concepts of discourse cohesion and coherence. We will see that connectives represent one type of cohesive tie and that discourse relations are crucial elements ensuring local coherence within a discourse. In the last part of the chapter, we present some important underlying methodological and theoretical choices that were made when selecting the topics covered in the book and the data presented in each chapter. We also emphasize that the study of discourse connectives and relations has many interfaces with other domains of linguistic analysis such as semantics, pragmatics and syntax.

The transversality effect for mutually incompatible social theories is that of non-exclusivity. Competing theories continue to exist and the elements of choice between theories are determined by practice, convenience and economies, and not necessarily by idealistic goals. Because Teubner does not propose any specific quality standards or quality control elements for a theory to qualify within a circle of competing theories, transversality can become, superficially, an instrument for human rights conceptualisation, whereby the quest for idealistic and practice-independent justification is lost. On further inspection, we can construe an argument that the loss of the quest towards idealism depends on how we understand the term idealism. Giving up the grand idea of human rights superiority, and accepting multiple readings of what human rights mean, leads to the extreme principle of anything goes within the meaning of Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism.

This chapter first considers the functional and semantic overlap between discourse connectives and discourse markers, where the latter is presented as including the former. Since the two categories share most protypical features, the fuzzy boundaries between the two categories are explained in terms of partial overlap.

We then show that the description of connectives’ meanings and functions can proceed following an onomasiological as well as a semasiological approach. The latter has given rise to numerous case studies in a variety of languages aiming to come to a fine-grained semantic description of specific connectives. Strenghts and weaknesses of such studies are presented. Onomasiological approaches focus on a set connectives that are categorized together on the basis of shared semantic properties, trying to disentangle their similarities and differences, within and across languages. In the final section, we turn to one of the most described features of discourse connectives namely its polysemy and polyfunctionality, and how contextual cues may help solve this ambiguity, and how polysemy is a key explaining factor in the (frequency) distribution of connectives.

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.