Abstract
This paper investigates the complexity of dependencies at the discourse level,
in particular the dependencies between discourse connectives and their arguments.
Our study is based on data fromthe Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB)
and is therefore an exploration into the ways treebanks can inform linguistic
issues. We observe that, unlike in syntax, there is more uncertainty and flexibility
with regards to the location and extent of discourse arguments. This
leads to a variety of possible patterns of dependencies between pairs of discourse
relations, including nested, crossed and a range of other non-tree-like
configurations. Nevertheless, our main conclusion is that the types of discourse
dependencies are highly restricted since the more complex cases can
be factored out by appealing to discourse notions like anaphora and attribution.
We conjecture that the complexity of dependencies is far more restricted
at the discourse level as compared to the syntactic level.
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