What excludes an Alternative in Coherence Relations?

This paper identifies features that occur frequently in coherence relations labelled CHOSEN ALTERNATIVE. This achieves two goals: (1) to identify evidence for an argument being considered an alternative excluded from further consideration, and (2) to contribute to the automatic identification of coherence relations and their arguments. It is shown that the simplest of these features occur significantly more often in implicit CHOSEN ALTERNATIVE relations than in explicit CHOSEN ALTERNATIVE relations, where a connective helps signal this sense.