The effect of establishing coherence in ellipsis and anaphora resolution

Abstract

This paper presents a new model of anaphoric processing that utilizes the establishment of coherence relations between clauses in a discourse. We survey data that comprises a currently stalemated argument over whether VP-ellipsis is an inherently syntactic or inherently semantic phenomenon, and show that the data can be handled within a uniform discourse processing architecture. This architecture, which revises the dichotomy between ellipsis vs. Model Interpretive Anaphora given by Sag and Hankamer (1984), is also able to accommodate divergent theories and data for pronominal reference resolution. The resulting architecture serves as a baseline system for modeling the role of cohesive devices in natural language.