Discourse Deixis: Reference to Discourse Segments

Summary

Computational models of discourse already had process-based accounts for anaphoric pronouns and definite descriptions, both tied to discourse entities that noun phrases evoke. This leaves out cases where a pronoun picks up a stretch of several clauses or sentences. Webber argues that such cases, which she calls discourse deixis, need their own resolution process rather than the one used for entity anaphora.

She draws on examples from written texts and on a small count of pronoun usage. In her proposal, a deictic expression (this/that) initially serves as a pointer that picks out a discourse segment's representation, with that segment lying on the discourse tree's right frontier. As the rest of the clause is interpreted, that pointer is narrowed either to some facet of the segment, such as its form, content, speech act or event, or to an entity mentioned inside it.

The main contribution is that discourse segments get a mental status separate from the entities they describe. This matters for building models of reference resolution and discourse structure.

Key points

In five written texts, 79 pronouns referred to clausal material. Only 14 (~18%) were it, while 65 (~82%) were this (48) or that (17).
By contrast, of 41 pronominal references to NP-evoked entities, 39 (~95%) used it and just 2 (~5%) used a demonstrative.
The right frontier is defined as the most recent closed segment together with all segments still open. It restricts which segments are available as deictic targets.
A two-house description shows that demonstratives point to the descriptions themselves, not the houses. When the two descriptions are interleaved, the references fail.
The this/that contrast (psychological distance) is said to apply only after the referent is located. Once a segment has been referred to deictically, it behaves like a discourse entity and can then be picked up with it.

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

26 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 7 of them have a page here, 19 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/982023.982037

@inproceedings{webber1988discourse,
  title = {{Discourse Deixis: Reference to Discourse Segments}},
  author = {Webber, Bonnie Lynn},
  booktitle = {26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1988},
  doi = {10.3115/982023.982037},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/982023.982037}
}

References

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