The article analyzes differences in the description of discourse relations in corpus research, in particular with the reference to the use of discourse markers – expressions that tie together subsequent fragments of the text and provide information about the nature of these relations. The text presents three concepts of the description of explicitness and implicitness of the content: Rhetorical Structure Theory, Penn Discourse Treebank and the author’s original proposal and indicates the consequences of each solution. The analysis of relations with particles as metatexual expressions defined in accordance with The Nest Dictionary of Polish reveals the possibility of expressing explicitness as a representation of elements of informational structure shaped by the use of a given particle, and implicitness as a lack of representation of certain elements of this type.