Focu, Activation, and This-Noun Phrases

Poesio, Massimo; Modjeska, Natalia N.

doi:10.1075/cilt.263.24poe

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Another, yet only partial, solution is to let subjects classify whether danach refers to a temporal or situational referent and whether it has a nominal or sentential antecedent, and not to force them to mark any antecedent as this is more difficult (cf. Poesio and Modjeska 2005). This implicates an underspecified representation with respect to the referent and to the antecedent.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

The German Temporal Anaphor danach—Ambiguity in Interpretation and Annotation

Knees

2008

Res on Lang and Comput

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I present different types of ambiguity that occur in annotating and resolving the German anaphoric adverbial danach ("thereafter"). By means of two pilot studies it is shown that referential ambiguity (i.e. the anaphor has several plausible referents) and structual dissociation (i.e. different antecedents specify the same referent) cause bad inter-annotator agreement. Both phenomena can only be explored in detail as the annotation studies do not only concentrate on the textual but also on the referential level involved in anaphoric references. Thus, it can be shown that the competing referents in most referentially ambiguous cases are more or less temporally and conceptually related to each other and specify a similiar reference time for danach ("thereafter"). Moreover, the competing antecedents often textually overlap so that some structurally dissociated cases can be handled by stricter annotation guidelines. Thus, considering the textual and the referential dimensions of anaphoric reference provides further insights into the cognitive processing of sentential anaphors like danach ("thereafter").

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

The German Temporal Anaphor danach—Ambiguity in Interpretation and Annotation

Knees

2008

Res on Lang and Comput

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“…The first example study we discuss, already reported in (Poesio and Modjeska, 2005), is an investigation of the suggestion that this-Noun Phrases-demonstrative pronouns this and these, and full NPs with this as a determiner-are primarily used to refer to entities that are somehow 'salient', but without being the 'focus' or 'topic' of the discourse (Linde, 1979;Gundel et al, 1993;Passonneau, 1993). Examples of entities that are felicitously realized by means of THIS-NPs are entities in the visual situation, or 'deixis', such as the room mentioned in (4) (Kaplan, 1979;Jarvella and Klein, 1982;André et al, 1999); abstract objects such as propositions, facts, or types, implicitly introduced in the discourse without being explicitly mentioned, as in (5) (Asher, 1993;Webber, 1991); and entities mentioned in a discourse, but not in most salient position, such as the area mentioned in (6) (Linde, 1979;Gundel et al, 1993;Passonneau, 1993).…”

Section: A First Pilot Study: Demonstrativesmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Gundel (1998) already proposed that notions from Centering can be used to specify more precisely which entities may be 'in focus', although she also calls for a modification of the theory, arguing that more than one entity may be 'in focus' (we return to this topic in the Discussion). Poesio and Modjeska (2005) identified three 'natural' ways of formalizing the notion of entity 'in focus' used by Gundel et al in terms of the conceptual vocabolary of Centering. An entity may be said to be 'in focus' if it is 1.…”

Section: A First Pilot Study: Demonstrativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

9 Linguistic Claims Formulated in Terms of Centering A Re‐Examination Using Parametric CB‐Tracking Techniques

Poesio¹

2008

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Using techniques for automatically tracking the CB in annotated corpora, we test a variety of claims about discourse formulated in terms of the notions of CB or topic: that THIS-NPs are best used to refer to entities not in topic; that there is a correlation between the use of pronouns or full NPs in subject position in an utterance and the type of transition (continue, shift, retain) performed by that utterance; that certain transitions correlate more with segment boundaries; and that long-distance pronominalizations are only licensed when referring to an entity acting as topic. Constraint 1 (Strong): All utterances of a segment except for the first have exactly one CB. Rule 1 (GJW95): If any CF is pronominalized, the CB is. Rule 2 (BFP): Transition states are ordered. The CONTINUE transition (CON) is preferred to the RETAIN transition (RET), which is preferred to the SMOOTH-SHIFT transition (SSH), which is preferred to the ROUGH-SHIFT transition (RSH). Constraint 1 expresses the original claim from (Joshi and Kuhn, 1979; Joshi and Weinstein, 1981) that discourses with exactly one (or no more than one) 'topic' at each point are easier to process. A weaker version of the Constraint, allowing also for utterances with no topic, can also been found in the literature: Constraint 1 (Weak): All utterances of a segment except for the 1st have at most one CB.

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“…Following previous research on the information status of referring expressions (see the work by Prince, 1981b;Ariel, 1988Ariel, , 1990Gundel et al, 1993;Hegarty et al, 2003;Poesio and Modjeska, 2005, inter alia), I put the main focus in checking whether significant differences can be found in the referring behaviour of these expressions and whether the alleged differences, if any, may have a bearing on the information status of their referents. With this purpose, I have conducted a corpus study where I have tested two factors that will help us distinguish between the two referring expressions: textual distance of the antecedent and antecedent type.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…propositions and events, which are typical antecedents for demonstrative anaphors) are likely to be activated, whereas noun phrases in prominent syntactic positions are more likely to be in focus. Poesio and Modjeska (2005) tried to refine linguistically the cognitive notions in focus, activated and short-term memory following the computational approach to anaphora resolution of Centering Theory (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1995). These authors annotated the corpus gnome for this purpose and tested the following hypotheses regarding speakers' preferences for 'This-nps' to refer to in focus entities:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic-Continuity and Topic-Shift Effects in Spanish Discourse

Hernández

2016

Int Rev Pragmat

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Differences in use among referring expressions are usually explained on the basis of the cognitive accessibility of their antecedents, where antecedent accessibility has been operationalized differently in the literature; i.e. as a grammatical role, as syntactic prominence or as antecedent distance. On these grounds, it has been proposed that personal pronouns prefer topical antecedents whereas demonstratives prefer nontopical antecedents. This paper investigates the referring properties of Spanish demonstratives and direct object personal pronouns with the aim to unveil their differences and similarities. My analysis shows that these two expressions are very similar referentially when a narrow view of discourse context is considered. However, important differences show up when a broader notion of context is thrown into the picture; i.e. contexts that extend beyond the immediate previous sentence and beyond the immediate local topic of discourse. Based on my corpus evidence and on previous research on the pragmatic interpretation of referring expressions, I claim that direct object personal pronouns and demonstrative noun phrases crucially differ in the way they contribute to discourse coherence; the former playing the role of topic continuity markers and the latter focalising referents that reintroduce suspended or declining topics and marking (sub)-topic shifts in the discourse.

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Focu, Activation, and This-Noun Phrases

Cited by 14 publications

References 16 publications

The German Temporal Anaphor danach—Ambiguity in Interpretation and Annotation

The German Temporal Anaphor danach—Ambiguity in Interpretation and Annotation

9 Linguistic Claims Formulated in Terms of Centering A Re‐Examination Using Parametric CB‐Tracking Techniques

Topic-Continuity and Topic-Shift Effects in Spanish Discourse

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