Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account Using Lexicalised TAG

What it is about

The paper argues that many discourse relations do not have to be carried by discourse structure. Some are carried by anaphoric presuppositions (van der Sandt 1992) that are licensed by eventualities the hearer is taken to share. Discourse structure is kept bare: lexicalised tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG) trees, with connectives as anchors. Words such as "then", "for example", "otherwise" and "too" presuppose a shared item and link to it, and the link is not structural. The authors give examples where a link to a non-adjacent event crosses a structural link, as in the "On the one hand ... then ... because" sequence. They distinguish the sources of the presupposition by type: a shared eventuality for temporal adverbs such as "then", a generalisation for "for example", a complementary modal base for "otherwise", and an alternative for "instead" and "rather". The paper contains no numbers. Its proposed next step is a corpus annotation of anaphoric presuppositions, starting from the 350 cue phrases listed by Knott (1996).

Ideas

• I1. Put the four licensing types in a table in 36. Discourse relations and coherence: for each presupposing adverb, its source type and its search rule. Use the table to decide where the world looks for the antecedent.
• I2. "Otherwise" needs a modal base: the real world minus the presupposed condition. Mark counterfactual contexts in prag (polarity and modality) and block "otherwise" there. Test on constructed pairs such as the paper's counterfactual example.
• I3. Count, in the school lessons, the discourse adverbs that have no structural antecedent in the same sentence, and check how many the four types cover.
• I4. Negative control: the rule for "for example" must fail when no generalisation is in the context. The paper's own examples show that the generalisation must be present (or inferable).

For Mova

The chapters are 36. Discourse relations and coherence and 33. Implicature and presupposition, with 35. Reference and coreference for the anaphoric side. The code is prag/src/infer.rs and world/src/qud.rs. The measure is the accuracy of the licensing rule on constructed and lesson examples, run twice, with the no-generalisation control.

Topics: Discourse analysis · Coreference resolution

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1034678.1034695

@inproceedings{webber1999discourse,
  title = {{Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account Using Lexicalised TAG}},
  author = {Webber, Bonnie and Knott, Alistair and Stone, Matthew and Joshi, Aravind},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1999},
  doi = {10.3115/1034678.1034695},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1034678.1034695}
}

References

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