Anaphoricity in connectives: From corpus analysis to lexical description and consequences for discourse parsing

在语言中，语篇联系语用来表示两个语篇片段之间的连贯关系，如因果关系、时间关系或对比关系。从句法角度看，连接词可以是连词，也可以是某些状语。虽然连词在不同的描述层次上已经得到了深入的研究，但对于话语状语来说，关于其与论元的映射，还有许多问题有待解决（相关的语篇片段）以及它们在构建语篇结构中的作用，而语篇结构又对读者很重要，例如在解决回指代词时。回指性的概念在我们对语篇状语的研究中起着核心作用，在许多连接词中是由一个显性照应语素给出的。我们的项目采用双语视角，使用德语、英语和平行双语文本语料库，在第一步中，研究这些连接词的使用条件：当连接词可以表示不同的连贯关系时，读者如何处理歧义？如果文本中没有明确地给出一个连接词的论元，那么在阅读的过程中，在什么情况下，通过什么方式“构建”这个论元呢？读者如何确定相关文本片段的边界--它们什么时候被清楚地识别出来，什么时候保持相当模糊，例如，它可能发生在一个以“但是”开头的句子中？读者如何科普同一个句子中多个连接词之间潜在的复杂互动？对两种语言的这些问题进行研究，一方面可以对德语和英语的连接词进行系统的比较;另一方面，它拓宽了话语状语对话语结构层次的影响的视角。早期的实证研究主要是在英语语料上进行的，但如果可能的话，应该从多语言的角度来研究语篇结构因素。我们计划通过与早期英语结果的比较来实现这一点。此外，结果将被转移到自动文本分析（“文本挖掘”）中。为此，为个人连接词收集的信息将在正式的词典条目，然后可以使用自动话语分析器建模;这样一个系统的原型将开发作为项目的一部分。

In language, discourse connectives are used to signal the presence of coherence relations between two text segments, such as causal, temporal or contrastive relationships. From the syntactic viewpoint, connectives can be conjunctions or certain adverbials. While conjunctions have been studied intensively on various levels of description, many questions are open for the discourse adverbials, regarding the mapping to their arguments (the text segments being related) and their role for constructing the discourse structure, which in turn is important for the reader, e.g. when resolving anaphoric pronouns.A central role in our investigations of discourse adverbials is played by the notion of anaphoricity, which in many connectives is given by an overt anaphoric morpheme. Our project adopts a bilingual perspective and uses German, English, and parallel bilingual text corpora for, in the first step, studying the usage conditions of these connectives: How do readers handle ambiguities, when a connective can signal different coherence relations? Under what circumstances and by what means is an argument of a connective being "constructed" during reading, in case it is not explicitly given in the text? How do readers determine the boundaries of the text segments being related - when are they identified clearly, and when do they remain rather vague, as it can happen for instance with a sentence-initial "but"? How do readers cope with potentially complex interactions between multiple connectives present within the same sentence?Studying these questions for two languages on the one hand allows for systematic comparison of German and English connectives; on the other hand it broadens the perspective for the consequences that discourse adverbials have for the level of discourse structure. Earlier empirical work has been done largely on English data; yet discourse-structural factors should be studied from a multi-lingual perspective if possible. We plan to accomplish this through comparisons to the earlier results for English.In addition, the results will be transferred to work in automatic text analysis ("text mining"). To this end, the information gathered for individual connectives will be modeled in formal lexicon entries that can then be used by an automatic discourse parser; a prototype of such a system will be developed as part of the project.