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xii Chapter 1 INCREMENTALITY AND PARSING........................................................................ 1 1.1

The division of text into visual segments such as sentences, paragraphs and sections achieves many

In computational theories of discourse, there are at least three processes presumed to operate under a limited attention constraint of some type: (1) ellipsis interpretation; (2) pronominal anaphora interpretation; and (3) inference of discourse relations between representations A and B of utterances in a discourse, e.g. B motivates A. In each case, the interpretation of the current element B of a discourse depends on the accessibility of another earlier element A. According to the limited attention constraint only a limited number of candidates need to be considered in the processing of B, e.g. only a limited number of entities in the discourse model are potential cospecifiers for a pronoun. The limited attention constraint has been defined by some researchers by linear recency: a representation of an utterance A is linearly recent for a representation of an utterance B if A is linearly adjacent to B. Using linear recency as a model of the limited attention constraint would mean that an antecedent for an anaphor is determined by a linear backward search of the text, or of a discourse model representation of the text (Clark and Sengul, 1979) inter alia. In contrast, other work has formulated the limited attention constraint in terms of