Discourse and Lexicons: Lexemes, MWEs, Grammatical Constructions and Compositional Word Combinations to Signal Discourse Relations

摘要

Lexicons generally record a list of lexemes or non-compositional multiword expressions. We propose to build lexicons for compositional word combinations, namely "secondary discourse connectives". Secondary discourse connectives play the same function as "primary discourse connectives" but the latter are either lexemes or non-compositional multiword expressions. The paper defines primary and secondary connectives, and explains why it is possible to build a lexicon for the compositional ones and how it could be organized. It also puts forward the utility of such a lexicon in discourse annotation and parsing. Finally, it opens the discussion on the constructions that signal a discourse relation between two spans of text.