Modelling Discourse in STAG: Subordinate Conjunctions and Attributing Phrases

We propose a new model in STAG syntax and semantics for subordinate conjunctions (SubConjs) and attributing phrases - attitude/reporting verbs (AVs; "believe", "say") and attributing prepositional phrase (APPs; "according to").This model is discourse-oriented, and is based on the observation that SubConjs and AVs are not homogeneous categories. Indeed, previous work has shown that SubConjs can be divided into two classes according to their syntactic and semantic properties. Similarly, AVs have two different uses in discourse: evidential and intentional. While evidential AVs and APPs have strong semantic similarities, they do not appear in the same contexts when SubConjs are at play. Our proposition aims at representing these distinctions and capturing these various discourse-related interactions.

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