The Predicate-Argument Structure of Discourse Connectives A Corpus-based Study

Discourse connectives can be analyzed as encoding predicate-argument relations whose arguments derive from the interpretation of discourse units. These arguments can be anaphoric or structural. Although structural arguments can be encoded in a parse tree, anaphoric arguments must be resolved by other means. A study of nine connectives, annotating the location, size, and syntactic type of their arguments, shows connective-specific patterns for each of these features. A preliminary study of inter-annotator consistency shows that it too varies by connective. Results of the corpus study will be used in the development of resolution algorithms for anaphoric connectives.