1. Setting the background in discourse
- Author
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Nicholas Asher, Laurent Prévot, and Laure Vieu
- Subjects
background ,discourse relation ,framing topic ,SDRT ,spatio-temporal frames ,Philology. Linguistics ,P1-1091 ,Computational linguistics. Natural language processing ,P98-98.5 - Abstract
Backgrounding relations play a crucial role in discourse and occur frequently in both written and oral corpora. These relations come in two flavors: either the background is introduced after or before the foreground (respectively Backgroundbackwardand Backgroundforward). In Segmented Discourse Representation Theory or SDRT (Asher, Lascarides, 2003), backgrounding relations were among the first to be considered (Lascarides, Asher, 1993). However, while (Vieu, Prévot, 2004) have recently done a careful study of Backgroundbackwardon the whole much less attention has been dedicated to Backgroundforwardsituations. Our approach for Backgroundforwardbuilds on the SDRT analysis of locative adverbials in IP-adjunct position proposed in (Vieu et al., 2005). Such locative adverbials, which have the ability to locate not only the sentence but a whole segment, introduce a complex discourse structure. In a nutshell, this structure contains a new discourse topic (framing topic), which is elaborated by the constituent representing the sentence or the discourse segment falling intuitively under the scope of the adverbial. We propose in this paper to use this mechanism to treat in a uniform way a wide range of phenomena that raise difficulties for a coherent and general treatment of Backgroundforwardconfigurations.
- Published
- 2008
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