The right frontier constraint as conditional

Abstract

The Right Frontier Constraint (RFC) claims that antecedents are only available for anaphoric reference if they are located at the right hand side of any level of a linearly ordered discourse parse tree. We show that this constraint does hold only under certain conditions -which, however, apply for most circumstances of everyday talk. The data of our analysis in which the RFC does not hold come from a corpus of chat communication. From our findings we argue that the RFC is best viewed as a conditional constraint. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.