Formal Discourse Grammar Tackling Verb Phrase Anaphora

摘要

An argument that an adequate treatment of Verb Phrase Anaphora (VPA) must departin two major respects from the standard approaches is presented. VP anaphors cannot be resolved by simply a syntactic/semantic parallelism between larger units (sentences or discourse constituent units) that the VP's occur in. Secondly, discourse structure has a significant influence on the possibilities of VPA. This influence must be accounted for. A treatment which fulfills these desiderata is proposed. It builds on a discourse grammar incorporating a syntactic/semantic matching procedure that is used to recognize parallel structures in discourse. It turns out that this independently motivated procedure yields the resolution of VPA as a side effect.