Anaphora and Discourse Semantics

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to be discourse connectives signalling discourse relations between adjacent discourse units are instead anaphors. We do this by (i) demonstrating their behavioral similarity with more common anaphors (pronouns and definite NPs); (ii) presenting a general framework for understanding anaphora into which they nicely fit; (iii) showing the interpretational benefits of understanding discourse adverbials as anaphors; and (iv) sketching out a lexicalised grammar that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference. Comments University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-01-13. At the time of publication, the author, Bonnie L. Webber, was affiliated with the University of Edinburgh. Currently, July 2007, she is a faculty member in the Department of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/30 Anaphora and Discourse Semantics Bonnie Webber Matthew Stone Edinburgh University Rutgers University Aravind Joshi Alistair Knott University of Pennsylvania University of Otago We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to be discourse connectives signalling discourse relations between adjacent discourse units are instead anaphors. We do this by (i) demonstrating their behavioral similarity with more common anaphors (pronouns and de nite NPs); (ii) presenting a general framework for understanding anaphora into which they nicely t; (iii) showing the interpretational bene ts of understanding discourse adverbials as anaphors; and (iv) sketching out a lexicalised grammar that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.