When do we need a connective? Cognitive complexity and the marking of coherence relations

Coherence relations such as cause-consequence and temporal sequence connect discourse segments. Analyzing translations of English segments containing also, because, although and if into Dutch, German, French and Spanish, we examined which features of coherence relations make them more, or less, likely to be implicit. We found that cognitively complex relations are more often explicitly marked than cognitively simple relations (e.g., negative vs. positive), and that implicitation is more likely when segments are involved in more than one coherence relation.