In Contrast - A Complex Discourse Connective

Erhard Hinrichs, Monica Lău


Abstract
This paper presents a corpus-based study of the discourse connective “in contrast”. The corpus data are drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) and are analyzed at the levels of syntax, discourse structure, and compositional semantics. Following Webber et al. (2003), the paper argues that “in contrast” crucially involves discourse anaphora and, thus, resembles other discourse adverbials such as “then”, “otherwise”, and “nevertheless”. The compositional semantics proposed for other discourse connectives, however, does not straightforwardly generalize to “in contrast”, for which the notions of contrast pairs and contrast properties are essential.
Anthology ID:
L08-1047
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/75_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Erhard Hinrichs and Monica Lău. 2008. In Contrast - A Complex Discourse Connective. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
In Contrast - A Complex Discourse Connective (Hinrichs & Lău, LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/75_paper.pdf