Đang chuẩn bị nút TẢI XUỐNG, xin hãy chờ
Tải xuống
It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the syntax, and (2) whether the form is anaphoric in the semantics. It is proposed that these features interact with one of two types of discourse inference, namely Common Topic inference and Coherent Situation inference. The differing ways in which these types of inference utilize syntactic and semantic representations predicts phenomena for which it is otherwise difficult to account. . | COMMON TOPICS AND COHERENT SITUATIONS INTERPRETING ELLIPSIS IN THE CONTEXT OF DISCOURSE INFERENCE Andrew Kehler Harvard University Aiken Computation Laboratory 33 Oxford Street Cambridge MA 02138 kehler@das.harvard.edu Abstract It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis event reference and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question 1 whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the syntax and 2 whether the form is anaphoric in the semantics. It is proposed that these features interact with one of two types of discourse inference namely Common Topic inference and Coherent Situation inference. The differing ways in which these types of inference utilize syntactic and semantic representations predicts phenomena for which it is otherwise difficult to account. Introduction Ellipsis is pervasive in natural language and hence has received much attention within both computational and theoretical linguistics. However the conditions under which a representation of an utterance may serve as a suitable basis for interpreting subsequent elliptical forms remain poorly understood specifically past attempts to characterize these processes within a single traditional module of language processing e.g. considering either syntax semantics or discourse in isolation have failed to account for all of the data. In this paper we claim that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis resolution event reference and interclausal coherence can be explained by the interaction between the syntactic and semantic properties of the form in question and the type of discourse inference operative in establishing the coherence of the antecedent and elided clauses. In the next section we introduce the facts concerning gapping VP-ellipsis and non-elliptical event reference that we seek to explain. In Section 3 we categorize elliptical and event referential forms according to two features 1 whether the expression leaves behind an empty .
