<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Proposals such as continuity and causality-by-default relate the level of expectedness of a relation to its
linguistic marking as an explicit or implicit relation. We investigate these two proposals with regard to the English transcripts
of six TED Talks and their Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish translations in the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank (TED-MDB),
annotated for discourse relations, following the Penn Discourse Treebank style of annotation. Our data shows that the
discontinuous relations <jats:sc>contrast</jats:sc> and <jats:sc>concession</jats:sc> are indeed frequently explicit in all languages. But continuous
relations show differences per relation and language. For instance, <jats:sc>cause</jats:sc> is frequently conveyed implicitly in English
and Portuguese, but not in Lithuanian and Turkish. We explore temporal continuity by analysing whether the forward-order sense
<jats:sc>result</jats:sc> is more frequently implicit than the backward-order <jats:sc>reason</jats:sc>. The hypothesis is confirmed by English
and Portuguese, but not Lithuanian and Turkish. However, in Turkish, the arguments of the backward-order relation <jats:sc>reason</jats:sc>
are frequently presented by the reversed order of arguments, retaining the linear order of events even in the presence of the
connective. The causality-by-default hypothesis is not confirmed, as <jats:sc>cause</jats:sc> is not the most frequent implicit relation in
the four languages.</jats:p>