Structure and ostension in the interpretation of discourse deixis

Abstract

This paper examines demonstrative pronouns used as deictics to refer to the interpretation of one or more clauses. Although this usage is frowned upon in style manuals (for example Strunk and White (1959) state that "This. The pronoun this, referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, cannot always carry the load and so may produce an imprecise statement."), it is nevertheless very common in written text.

Motivations And Implications Of Veins Theory

“…The substitution is the operation in which an elementary tree (which does not contain a foot) replaces a special node, called substitution node, placed on the frontier of the developing tree. Moreover, it can be proved formally that the principle of sequentiality is observed during an incremental process only if the auxiliary trees are left-footed and the adjunction is restricted to the generalized right-frontier 3 , result consistent with a similar one based on empirical observations [32].…”

Determiner-Established Deixis to Communicative Artifacts in Pedagogical Text

“…Seminal papers by Webber (1988Webber ( , 1991 established the importance of discourse deixis, although they focused upon demonstrative pronouns such as "this" or "that". Many efforts have addressed discourse deixis in the context of anaphora; these include Poesio and Artstein's (2008), who created a corpus of anaphoric relations inclusive of (but not limited to) discourse.…”

“…The kinds of deixis represented in (1) and (2) are similar to discourse deixis (Webber, 1991) and textual deixis (Lyons, 1977), respectively. Sentence (3) contains deixis to a structural element of a document (Paraboni and Deemter, 2006), and (4) contains an example of deixis to illustrative items such as figures or examples.…”

Fragmenting Meaning: Clarification Ellipsis and Nominal Anaphora

“…The latter are facts that either (after potentially being discussed) have been stored longterm or arise as side effects to issues that were never explicitly under discussion. This proposed dichotomy is inspired in part by work on fact and propositional anaphora in texts by (Webber, 1991;Asher, 1993) and enables one to propose a purely semantic, dialogical version of the Right Frontier Constraint (RFC) proposed for texts, based on an analogy that relates the text-derived notion of open constituent ('unexhausted topic') with the dialogue-derived notion of question currently under discussion. Formally, the distinction is captured by positing two distinct repositories within FACTS: STORED is modelled classically as a set of facts closed under meets and joins.…”