Interplay of Coreference and Discourse Relations: Discourse Connectives with a Referential Component

Abstract

This contribution explores the subgroup of text structuring expressions with the form preposition + demonstrative pronoun, thus it is devoted to an aspect of the interaction of coreference relations and relations signaled by discourse connectives (DCs) in a text. The demonstrative pronoun typically signals a referential link to an antecedent, whereas the whole expression can, but does not have to, carry a discourse meaning in sense of discourse connectives. We describe the properties of these phrases/expressions with regard to their antecedents, their position among the text-structuring language means and their features typical for the “connective function” of them compared to their “non-connective function”. The analysis is carried out on Czech data from the approx. 50,000 sentences of the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0, directly on the syntactic trees. We explore the characteristics of these phrases/expressions discovered during two projects: the manual annotation of 1, coreference relations (Nedoluzhko et al. 2011) and 2, discourse connectives, their scopes and meanings (Mladová et al. 2008).

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