Bridges between events
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Matthias Irmer
Abstract
Bridging consists of an indirect anaphoric relationship, which is not expressed by linguistic means, between an entity introduced in a discourse and some previously mentioned discourse entity. Indirect anaphora can refer back not only to objects that are talked about in the discourse, but also to abstract entities such as eventualities. In order to establish these connections, this contribution exploits the idea of Frame Semantics that world knowledge is organized in frames, in which all relevant participants to an event are stored. With each eventuality introduced in a discourse, a corresponding frame is evoked in the discourse model. SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory) is extended to include possibly underspecified representations of frame elements, thus supporting and constraining the resolution of indirect anaphora involving eventualities.
Abstract
Bridging consists of an indirect anaphoric relationship, which is not expressed by linguistic means, between an entity introduced in a discourse and some previously mentioned discourse entity. Indirect anaphora can refer back not only to objects that are talked about in the discourse, but also to abstract entities such as eventualities. In order to establish these connections, this contribution exploits the idea of Frame Semantics that world knowledge is organized in frames, in which all relevant participants to an event are stored. With each eventuality introduced in a discourse, a corresponding frame is evoked in the discourse model. SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory) is extended to include possibly underspecified representations of frame elements, thus supporting and constraining the resolution of indirect anaphora involving eventualities.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Processing narrative texts 17
- Through narrative planning towards the preverbal message 45
- Bridges between events 77
- The semantics of French continuative rises in SDRT 109
- Coherence structure and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts 137
- Complex connectives in German 165
- Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish 183
- Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English 207
- Index 227
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Processing narrative texts 17
- Through narrative planning towards the preverbal message 45
- Bridges between events 77
- The semantics of French continuative rises in SDRT 109
- Coherence structure and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts 137
- Complex connectives in German 165
- Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish 183
- Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English 207
- Index 227
