@inproceedings{dong-etal-2024-syntactic,
    title = "Syntactic Preposing and Discourse Relations",
    author = "Dong, Yunfang  and
      Liao, Xixian  and
      Webber, Bonnie",
    editor = "Graham, Yvette  and
      Purver, Matthew",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2024",
    address = "St. Julian{'}s, Malta",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.eacl-long.170/",
    pages = "2790--2802",
    abstract = "Over 15 years ago, Ward {\&} Birner (2006) suggested that non-canonical constructions in English can serve both to mark information status and to structure the information flow of discourse. One such construction is preposing, where a phrasal constituent appears to the left of its canonical position, typically sentence-initially. But computational work on discourse has, to date, ignored non-canonical syntax. We take account of non-canonical syntax by providing quantitative evidence relating NP/PP preposing to discourse relations. The evidence comes from an LLM mask-filling task that compares the predictions when a mask is inserted between the arguments of an implicit inter-sentential discourse relation {---} first, when the right-hand argument (Arg2) starts with a preposed constituent, and again, when that constituent is in canonical (post-verbal) position. Results show that (1) the top-ranked mask-fillers in the preposed case agree more often with ``gold'' annotations in the Penn Discourse TreeBank than they do in the latter case, and (2) preposing in Arg2 can affect the distribution of discourse-relational senses."
}