Syntactic Form and Discourse Function in NLG

Previous research has shown that certain discourse conditions are necessary for the felicitous use of non-canonical syntactic forms like topicalization, left-dislocation, and clefts. However, the distribution of these forms does not correlate one-to-one with the presence of these conditions, and a system that generates these statisticallyrare forms based only on these conditions will overgenerate. Instead, a generation algorithm must be based on additional communicative goals that can be achieved through the use of these forms. Based on a corpus study, I present three types of communicative goals that speakers achieve through the use of non-canonical syntax.