Abstract

This paper presents a new model of anaphoric processing that utilizes the establishment of coherence relations between clauses in a discourse. We survey data that comprises a currently stalemated argument over whether VP-ellipsis is an inherently syntactic or inherently semantic phenomenon, and show that the data can be handled within a uniform discourse processing architecture. This architecture, which revises the dichotomy between ellipsis vs. Model Interpretive Anaphora given by Sag and Hankamer (1984) , is also able to accommodate divergent theories and data for pronominal reference resolution. The resulting architecture serves as a baseline system for modeling the role of cohesive devices in natural language. 1 Introduction There has been much debate concerning the appropriate level of language processing at which to treat VP-ellipsis resolution. Syntactic accounts (Fiengo and May, 1990; Haik, 1987; Hellan, 1988; Hestvik, 1993; Lappin, 1993; Lappin and McCord, 1990) claim that ...

Citations

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