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Sentence Structure and Discourse Structure: Possible Parallels

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2011

Abstract

The present contribution represents the first step in comparing the nature of syntactico-semantic relations present in the sentence structure to their equivalents in the discourse structure. We distinguish various types of relations that can be expressed both within a single sentence (i.e. in a tree) and in a larger text, beyond the sentence boundary (between trees).

We suggest that, on the one hand, each type of these relations preserves its semantic nature both within a sentence and in a larger text (e.g. a causal relation remains a causal relation) but, on the other hand, according to the semantic properties of the relations, their distribution in a sentence or between sentences is very diverse. In this study, this observation is analyzed for two cases (relations of condition and specification) and further supported by similar behaviour of the English data from the Penn Discourse Treebank.