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The Rhetorical Structure of Attribution

Summary

The paper addresses a long-running dispute in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST): should ATTRIBUTION, the link between a reporting predicate and the content it reports, count as a discourse relation? Many resources and parsers use it, including the RST Discourse Treebank. Yet classical RST and later critics have rejected it. Potter splits the debate into three questions: whether the parts qualify as discourse units, how nuclearity should be assigned, and which relation actually holds between them. He examines them using classical RST, where the writer's intended effect, rather than syntax, is what determines structure.

The paper is theoretical. It re-examines published analyses from Carlson & Marcu (2001), Redeker & Egg (2006), Taboada & Hay (2008) and Das & Taboada (2013), and adds new analyses by the author. The conclusion is that attributions are relational, but no single fixed pattern describes them. Depending on the writer's goal, either part can be the nucleus. The link may be one of several existing RST relations, so attribution is better treated as a family of attributional instances of those relations than as a single relation. This affects annotation schemes and discourse parsers that treat ATTRIBUTION as one uniform label.

Key points

  • The three issues are interdependent. Reporting and reported parts count as discourse units because they take part in discourse relations.
  • Nuclearity varies from case to case:
    • Carlson & Marcu always make the attribution predicate the satellite.
    • Redeker & Egg make it the nucleus.
    • Potter argues that both fixed schemes are a false dilemma.
  • Attributional constructions can realize JUSTIFY, ELABORATION, EVIDENCE, EVALUATION, INTERPRETATION and CAUSE, not only ATTRIBUTION.
  • A re-reading of the much-analyzed CCC nuclear-freeze letter shows attributions working as a "faux" CONCESSION that helps win the members' support.
  • The author admits that intended-effect analysis is hard to scale to large corpora. He argues it still shapes requirements for future scalable methods.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

5 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-2706

@inproceedings{potter2019rhetorical,
  title = {{The Rhetorical Structure of Attribution}},
  author = {Potter, Andrew},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking 2019},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-2706},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-2706}
}

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