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Discourse grammar and verb phrase anaphora

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Abstract

We argue that an adequate treatment of verb phrase anaphora (VPA) must depart in two major respects from the standard approaches. First of all, VP anaphors cannot be resolved by simply identifying the anaphoric VP with an antecedent VP. The resolution process must establish a syntactic/semantic parallelism between larger units (clauses or discourse constituent units) that the VPs occur in. Secondly, discourse structure has a significant influence on the reference possibilities of VPA. This influence must be accounted for.

We propose a treatment which meets these requirements. It builds on a discourse grammar which characterizes discourse cohesion by means of a syntactic/semantic matching procedure which recognizes parallel structures in discourse. It turns out that this independently motivated procedure yields the resolution of VPA as a side effect.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation Faculty of Arts, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Hub Prüst, Remko Scha & Martin van den Berg

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  1. Hub Prüst
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  2. Remko Scha
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  3. Martin van den Berg
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Additional information

We thank Martin Stokhof, Nissim Francez and Jeff Pelletier for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are especially grateful to Richard Oehrle for his detailed comments which led to a number of significant improvements.

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Prüst, H., Scha, R. & van den Berg, M. Discourse grammar and verb phrase anaphora. Linguist Philos 17, 261–327 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00985038

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