1996/08/16 by Christine Doran, Doran, Christine
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #cmp-lg #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cmp-lg/9608011
11 pages, 11 ps figures, Proceedings of SIGPARSE 96 - Punctuation in Computational Linguistics
arxiv created 1996/08/16 · openalex publication_date 1996/08/16 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Quoted speech is often set off by punctuation marks, in particular quotation marks. Thus, it might seem that the quotation marks would be extremely useful in identifying these structures in texts. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite so clear. In this work, I will argue that quotation marks are not adequate for either identifying or constraining the syntax of quoted speech. More useful information comes from the presence of a quoting verb, which is either a verb of saying or a punctual verb, and the presence of other punctuation marks, usually commas. Using a lexicalized grammar, we can license most quoting clauses as text adjuncts. A distinction will be made not between direct and indirect quoted speech, but rather between adjunct and non-adjunct quoting clauses.