Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives

Harris, Jesse; Potts, Christopher

doi:10.1007/s10988-010-9070-5

Cited by 138 publications

(125 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…However, we also observed that pragmatic factors often facilitate exceptional anaphoric dependencies in attitude predications. Karttunen (1973) referred to this as the 'leakiness' of these predicates -information introduced in their scope seems often to percolate up to the text level in a wide range of contexts (Rooryck, 2001;Simons, 2007;Harris & Potts, 2009 model is trained on real usage data, it is not surprising that it reflects these pragmatic factors rather than just the lexical semantics (de Marneffe et al, 2012).…”

Section: Semantic Environment Of the Mentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling the Lifespan of Discourse Entities with Application to Coreference Resolution

Marneffe

Recasens

Potts

2015

jair

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A discourse typically involves numerous entities, but few are mentioned more than once. Distinguishing those that die out after just one mention (singleton) from those that lead longer lives (coreferent) would dramatically simplify the hypothesis space for coreference resolution models, leading to increased performance. To realize these gains, we build a classifier for predicting the singleton/coreferent distinction. The model's feature representations synthesize linguistic insights about the factors affecting discourse entity lifespans (especially negation, modality, and attitude predication) with existing results about the benefits of "surface" (part-of-speech and n-gram-based) features for coreference resolution. The model is effective in its own right, and the feature representations help to identify the anchor phrases in bridging anaphora as well. Furthermore, incorporating the model into two very different state-of-the-art coreference resolution systems, one rule-based and the other learning-based, yields significant performance improvements.

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Section: Semantic Environment Of the Mentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling the Lifespan of Discourse Entities with Application to Coreference Resolution

Marneffe

Recasens

Potts

2015

jair

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“…The pragmatic effects on supplement projection due to contextual factors and the availability of alternatives, discussed briefly in Section 2.1.2, need to be investigated too. I have also avoided discussing the fact that supplements can, depending on context, take on either the speaker's or an embedded agent's perspective (Amaral, Roberts & Smith 2007, Harris & Potts 2009. But this paper contributes to…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Supplemental update

Martin

2017

Semantics and Pragmatics

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Supplements have often been characterized as inert with respect to other content. But under closer scrutiny, the data shows that supplements can take scope and participate in anaphoric links, undermining multidimensional accounts of them. I argue that the core empirical facts pertaining to supplements, including projection, can in many cases be accounted for by more general, independently motivated factors such as anaphora resolution in discourse and quantifier scope preferences. Importantly, supplement projection is decoupled from at-issueness, with projection arising instead as an epiphenomenon of various external influences.The account is formalized in a dynamic, compositional, and unidimensional semantics that allows anaphoric links to and from supplement content. Since supplements are modeled as a kind of quantifier phrase modifier, scope interactions with semantic operators are captured without further stipulation. When a supplement takes widest scope, it constitutes a separate at-issue proposal, enabling both supplement projection and (non)deniability. The formal machinery requires no additional rules or representation layers except for the dynamic meaning of the comma intonation, which demarcates a supplement from its surrounding content.

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“…For example, not-at-issue expressions have been argued to be generally "scopeless" in that they do not take scope with respect to semantic operators in their host utterances (Potts 2012;Nouwen 2014), although this does not appear to be a categorical restriction (Amaral et al 2007;Schlenker 2013). In addition, although not-at-issue material is typically thought to reflect speaker commitments (Potts 2005), there is some evidence that this can be modulated in appropriate pragmatic contexts (Harris & Potts 2009). Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the truth of an at-issue expression has been argued to be independent of the truth of any not-at-issue material associated with it.…”

Section: Not-at-issue Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

No longer an orphan: evidence for appositive attachment from sentence comprehension

Dillon

Frazier

Clifton

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In this paper, we investigate the comprehension of appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives. First, we present experimental evidence that suggests that nominal appositives and appositive relative clauses behave like other adjunct phrases with respect to ambiguity resolution (Experiment 1). Second, we show that an ambiguous nominal appositive can modify a distant syntactic head as easily across an appositive relative clause as across a restrictive relative clause (Experiment 2). Last, we show that syntactic repair is as successful across an appositive relative clause or parenthetical as it is across an at-issue restrictive relative clause (Experiment 3). Taken together, our results suggest that i) appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives are syntactically sited in a fashion comparable to restrictive relative clauses and ii) appositive phrases do not substantially reduce the availability of the syntactic material that precedes the appositive phrase as might have been expected if processing an appositive involved shifting attention to a higher structure, away from local preceding constituents. These results constitute an argument from sentence comprehension for a local syntactic attachment of appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives (cf. Jackendoff 1977;Potts 2005;de Vries 2006), and against so-called orphan analyses of appositive content (e.g. Ross 1967; Haegeman 1988).

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Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives

Cited by 138 publications

References 29 publications

Modeling the Lifespan of Discourse Entities with Application to Coreference Resolution

Modeling the Lifespan of Discourse Entities with Application to Coreference Resolution

Supplemental update

No longer an orphan: evidence for appositive attachment from sentence comprehension

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