Anaphora In Discourse

Author : Barbara A. Fox
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 1993-02-11
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0521439906

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Discourse Structure and Anaphora by Barbara A. Fox Pdf

Barbara Fox's thoughtful study examines the use of anaphora in both written and spoken discourse. Any treatment of anaphora must consider the hierarchical of its source texts-type. Texts may be produced and heard or read linearly, but they are designed and understood hierarchically. Discourse Structure and Anaphora goes beyond the information processing concerns of cognitive science to assess the critical role played in all text-types by social, interactional and affective factors. It also considers the fact that texts are organised by socially accepted conventions. Using conversation analysis and rhetorical structure analysis, this book looks at the distribution of pronouns and full noun phrases in three different genres of English, taking data from naturally occurring face-to-face and telephone conversations, small newspaper and magazine articles and a psychoanalytic biography.

Author : John Hinds
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 1978
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : STANFORD:36105038791138

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Anaphora in Discourse by John Hinds Pdf

Author : Bonnie Lynn Webber
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2016-11-18
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781315403328

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A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora by Bonnie Lynn Webber Pdf

First published in 1979, this book starts from the perspective that dealing with anaphoric language can be decomposed into two complementary tasks: 1. identifying what a text potentially makes available for anaphoric reference and 2. constraining the candidate set of a given anaphoric expression down to one possible choice. The author argues there is an intimate connection between formal sentential analysis and the synthesis of an appropriate conceptual model of the discourse. Some of the issues with the creation of this conceptual model are discussed in the second chapter, which follows a background to the thesis that catalogues the types of anaphoric expression available in English and lists the types of things that can be referred to anaphorically. The third and fourth chapters examine two types of anaphoric expression that do not refer to non-linguistic entities. The final chapter details three areas into which this research could potentially be extended. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics.

Author : Barbara A. Fox
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 530 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027229274

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Studies in Anaphora by Barbara A. Fox Pdf

The last 15 years has seen an explosion of research on the topic of anaphora. Studies of anaphora have been important to our understanding of cognitive processes, the relationships between social interaction and grammar, and of directionality in diachronic change. The contributions to this volume represent the “next generation” of studies in anaphora — defined broadly as those morpho-syntactic forms available to speakers for formulating reference — taking as their starting point the foundation of research done in the 1980s. These studies examine in detail, and with a richness of methods and theories, what patterns of anaphoric usage can reveal to us about cognition, social interaction, and language change.

Author : Francis Cornish
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0198700288

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Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding by Francis Cornish Pdf

"This was a different man," said Mr Welbecker. "Listen! This man was called Hamlet and his uncle had killed his father because he wanted to marry his mother.""What did he want to marry his mother for?" said William. "I've never heard of anyone wanting to marry their mother."*In almost any conversation the meaning of what is said depends on the listener seeing how some words refer to what has already been said, and that others must be related to the characteristics of time, place, or person of the situation around which the conversation revolves. These modes ofreference, anaphora and deixis respectively, involve surprisingly complicated cognitive and syntactic processes, which people (normally) perform easily and unerringly. But they present formidable problems for the linguist and cognitive scientist trying to explain precisely how comprehension isachieved. Anaphora and deixis are thus a central research focus in syntactic theory, while understanding and modelling their operation in discourse are important targets in computational linguistics and cognitive science. In this ambitious work, Francis Cornish sets out an original theory ofanaphora and deixis, and proposes a new and elegant theoretical model to represent the transfer of meaning in discourse.Dr Cornish considers anaphoric reference in discourse from both psychological and linguistic perspectives. He argues that anaphora and deixis are essentially parts of integrative discourse procedures that facilitate the linking of representations held in working memory. He brings together work bylinguists, formal semanticists, psychologists, and researchers in artificial intelligence, as well as drawing on his own extensive experimental work on a variety of corpora of different genres in French and English.Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding will interest researchers and advanced students in a variety of fields within and outside linguistics, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, syntactic theory, formal semantics, and the analysis of discourse.[* from William - The Pirate by Richmal Crompton, London, Macmillan, 1932]

Author : Nicholas Asher
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789401117159

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Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse by Nicholas Asher Pdf

Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse presents a novel framework and analysis of the ways we refer to abstract objects in natural language discourse. The book begins with a typology of abstract objects and related entities like eventualities. After an introduction to `bottom up, compositional' discourse representation theory (DRT) and to previous work on abstract objects in DRT (notably work on the semantics of the attitudes), the book turns to a semantic analysis of eventuality and abstract object denoting nominals in English. The book then substantially revises and extends the dynamic semantic framework of DRT to develop an analysis of anaphoric reference to abstract objects and eventualities that exploits discourse structure and the discourse relations that obtain between elements of the structure. A dynamic, semantically based theory of discourse structure (SDRT) is proposed, along with many illustrative examples. Two further chapters then provide the analysis of anaphoric reference to propositions VP ellipsis. The abstract entity anaphoric antecedents are elements of the discourse structures that SDRT develops. The final chapter discusses some logical and philosophical difficulties for a semantic analysis of reference to abstract objects. For semanticists, philosophers of language, computer scientists interested in natural language applications and discourse, philosophical logicians, graduate students in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

Author : Sarah E. Blackwell
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1588112799

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Implicatures in Discourse by Sarah E. Blackwell Pdf

"Implicatures in Discourse" examines Spanish conversations and oral narratives in order to seek support for a pragmatic theory of anaphora. Blackwell argues that the use of anaphoric expressions may be considered conversational implicatures that give rise to inferences of coreference and non-coreference. Her analysis shows how speakers abide by Levinson's 'neo-Gricean' principles of Quantity, Informativeness, and Manner, but that grammatical, semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic constraints interact with the neo-Gricean principles, influencing anaphora use and interpretation. The study also reveals how mutual knowledge, including familiarity with Spanish social and cultural norms, enables interlocutors to use and comprehend minimal referring expressions, which cultural outsiders may not be able to interpret. While drawing on earlier work on anaphora and reference, this book offers a fresh look at discourse anaphora, and sheds light on the ways in which speakers felicitously use and interpret anaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative contexts.

Author : Ronald Geluykens
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2013-08-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110846171

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The Pragmatics of Discourse Anaphora in English by Ronald Geluykens Pdf

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

Author : Simon Philip Botley,Tony McEnery
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2000-06-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027298904

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Corpus-based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora by Simon Philip Botley,Tony McEnery Pdf

Discourse anaphora is a challenging linguistic phenomenon that has given rise to research in fields as diverse as linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science. Because of the diversity of approaches these fields bring to the anaphora problem, the editors of this volume argue that there needs to be a synthesis, or at least a principled attempt to draw the differing strands of anaphora research together. The selected papers in this volume all contribute to the aim of synthesis and were selected to represent the growing importance of corpus-based and computational approaches to anaphora description, and to developing natural language systems for resolving anaphora in natural language.

Author : Francis Cornish
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-07-03
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781317421528

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Anaphoric Relations in English and French by Francis Cornish Pdf

First published in 1986, this book focuses on Anaphoric relations in the English and French languages, a phenomenon that involves a complex interaction between grammar and discourse. Studies of anaphora taking a largely ‘textual’ approach to the subject have tended to underestimate the effect upon its formation of referential and discourse factors, while studies framed within a psycholinguistic and computational perspective have been inclined to minimise the importance of the purely linguistic features connected with anaphora. This volume places the study of anaphora upon a firmer foundation by examining both its nature and functions in discourse, by pinpointing the range of factors relevant to its operation in the two languages under study, and by attempting to relate the textual and interactional perspectives within a more comprehensive framework.

Author : Bonnie Lynn Webber
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 1979
Category : Anaphora (Linguistics)
ISBN : OCLC:227498396

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A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora by Bonnie Lynn Webber Pdf

Extended natural language communication between a person engaged in solving a problem or seeking information and a machine providing assistance requires the machine to be able to deal with anaphoric language in a perspicuous, transportable non-ad hoc way. This report takes the view that dealing with anaphoric language can be decomposed into two complementary tasks: (1) identifying what a text potentially makes available for anaphoric reference; and (2) constraining the candidate set of a given anaphoric expression down to one possible choice. The second task has been called the 'Anaphor resolution' problem and, to date, has stimulated much research in psychology and artificial intelligence natural language understanding. The focus of this report is the first task - that of identifying what a text makes available for anaphoric reference and how it does so.

Author : Helene Schmolz
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2015-03-30
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110416817

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Anaphora Resolution and Text Retrieval by Helene Schmolz Pdf

This book covers anaphora resolution for the English language from a linguistic and computational point of view. First, a definition of anaphors that applies to linguistics as well as information technology is given. On this foundation, all types of anaphors and their characteristics for English are outlined. To examine how frequent each type of anaphor is, a corpus of different hypertexts has been established and analysed with regard to anaphors. The most frequent type are non-finite clause anaphors - a type which has never been investigated so far. Therefore, the potential of non-finite clause anaphors are further explored with respect to anaphora resolution. After presenting the fundamentals of computational anaphora resolution and its application in text retrieval, rules for resolving non-finite clause anaphors are established. Therefore, this book shows that a truly interdisciplinary approach can achieve results which would not have been possible otherwise.

Author : Gennaro Chierchia
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2009-02-20
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780226104515

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Dynamics of Meaning by Gennaro Chierchia Pdf

In The Dynamics of Meaning, Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface.

Author : Ruslan Mitkov
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2014-02-24
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781317881810

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Anaphora Resolution by Ruslan Mitkov Pdf

Teaching computers to solve language problems is one of the major challenges of natural language processing. There is a large amount of interesting research devoted to this field. This book fills an existing gap in the literature with an up-to-date survey of the field, including the author’s own contributions. A number of different fields overlap in anaphora resolution – computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), grammar, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and artificial intelligence. This book begins by introducing basic notions and terminology, moving onto early research methods and approaches, recent developments and applications, and future directions. It addresses various issues related to the practical implementation of anaphora systems, such as rules employed, algorithms implemented or evaluation techniques used. This is an ideal reference book for students and researchers in this particular area of computational linguistics. Since anaphora resolution is vital for the development of any practical NLP system, the book will be of interest to readers from both academia and industry.

Author : Sarah E. Blackwell
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2003-03-06
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9789027296894

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Implicatures in Discourse by Sarah E. Blackwell Pdf

Implicatures in Discourse examines Spanish conversations and oral narratives in order to seek support for a pragmatic theory of anaphora. Blackwell argues that the use of anaphoric expressions may be considered conversational implicatures that give rise to inferences of coreference and non-coreference. Her analysis shows how speakers abide by Levinson's 'neo-Gricean' principles of Quantity, Informativeness, and Manner, but that grammatical, semantic, cognitive, and pragmatic constraints interact with the neo-Gricean principles, influencing anaphora use and interpretation. The study also reveals how mutual knowledge, including familiarity with Spanish social and cultural norms, enables interlocutors to use and comprehend minimal referring expressions, which cultural outsiders may not be able to interpret. While drawing on earlier work on anaphora and reference, this book offers a fresh look at discourse anaphora, and sheds light on the ways in which speakers felicitously use and interpret anaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative contexts.