Conceptual and Discourse Structures in Parsing Zero Anaphors

摘要

Languages like Korean and Japanese are well-known for the flexible usages of zero pronouns. This paper provides a resolution mechanism for establishing the referential relation of such covert anaphors in dialogues in general. It first looks into the characteristics of pronoun distributions in the language, and then suggests that sentences with zero anaphors tend to exhibit the Slot Link-Focus structure on the empirical evidence from real-life dialogues. We also propose a revised ranking of the forward-looking centers in the sense of centering theory.