Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account Using Lexicalised TAG

Bonnie L. Webber, Alistair Knott, Matthew Stone, Aravind K. Joshi

Abstract: We show that discourse structure need not bear the full burden of conveying discourse relations by showing that many of them can be explained nonstructurally in terms of the grounding of anaphoric presuppositions (Van der Sandt, 1992). This simplifies discourse structure, while still allowing the realisation of a full range of discourse relations. This is achieved using the same semantic machinery used in deriving clause-level semantics.