Anaphoric arguments of discourse connectives: Semantic properties of antecedents versus non-antecedents

We have argued extensively in prior work that discourse connectives can be analyzed as encoding predicate-argument relations whose arguments derived from the interpretation of discourse units. All adverbial connectives we have analyzed to date have expressed binary relations. But they are special in taking one of their two arguments structurally, and the other, anaphorically. As such, interpreting adverbial discourse connectives can be understood as a problem of anaphora resolution. In this paper we study the S-modifying adverbial connective “instead” and what, in the context, does and does not serve as antecedent for its anaphoric argument. This work extends earlier work investigating syntactic patterns of anaphoric arguments across a range of adverbial discourse connectives and the reliability with which these arguments can be annotated. The current work establishes, for 100 successive corpus instances of “instead”, lexico-syntactic features of the antecedents of their anaphoric arguments that can be automatically annotated and therefore used to distinguish actual antecedents from potential competitors in the context.