2001/09/09 by Bonnie Webber, Webber, Bonnie, Matthew Stone +6 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #I.2.7 #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0109010
45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistics
openalex publication_date 2001/09/09 · arxiv created 2002/09/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.