Understanding an utterance in an argument crucially requires determining the evidential relations it bears to prior and subsequent propositions in the argument (Birnbaum et al., 1980; Cohen, 1981). The memory representation of an argument should, accordingly, indicate which propositions a given proposition counts as evidence for (a support relation) or against (an attack relation), and which pr...

The issue on Japanese ditransitive construction concerns its hierarchical relation between dative and accusative arguments. There have been two different proposals on this issue. The standard approach (Hoji 1985, Takano 1988) claims that the dative>accusative word order reflects the base structure, and that the accusative>dative word order is derived by the application of Move α (Saito 1985, 19...

Subjects and objects are arguments of verbs. They show either homogeneous or heterogeneous properties, with respect to time. The subject of sleep and the subject of fall are homogeneous and heterogeneous, respectively. In this research, we develop a novel analysis of the organization of arguments of various types of verbs. We argue that heterogeneous arguments are hosted in two levels of Verb P...

This paper demonstrates that generating arguments in natural language requires planning at an abstract level, and that the appropriate abstraction cannot be captured by approaches based solely upon coherence relations. An abstraction based planning system is presented which employs operators motivated by empirical study and rhetorical maxims. These operators include a subset of traditional dedu...