Anaphora and Discourse Structure
Abstract
We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cs/0109010,
title = {Anaphora and Discourse Structure},
author = {Bonnie Webber and Matthew Stone and Aravind Joshi and Alistair Knott},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0109010},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistics