Multiple Discourse Connectives in a Lexicalized Grammar For Discourse

Lexicalized grammars1 such as TAG (Joshi, 1987; XTAG-Group, 1998) and CCG (Steedman, 1996) have been very successful in showing how clauselevel syntax and semantics project from the lexicon. What drives the current enterprise is the hypothesis that the same can be shown true, at some level, for discourse syntax and semantics. Here we demonstrate our initial effort to — extend a lexicalized grammar (LTAG) to discourse; — use the same compositional semantics on syntactic structure that is used in lexicalized grammars (Steedman, 1996; Stone and Doran, 1997; Stone and Webber, 1998; Joshi and Vijay-Shanker, 1999); — extend to discourse connectives the idea that the meaning of a lexical element can involve an anaphoric link to the previous discourse; — exploit similar inference mechanisms for defeasible aspects of both sentence-level and discourse semantics.

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