Text Type and the Position of a Temporal Adverbial within the Sentence

A sentence with a certain type of temporal adverbial is ambiguous, and one reading is lost when the adverbial appears in sentence-initial position. Sentence (1a), for example, has a reading in which there was some three-hear period in the past during which Mary lived in Amsterdam and a reading in which Mary has lived in Amsterdam for the three years preceding speech time: (1) a. Mary has lived in Amsterdam for three years. b. For three years Mary has lived in Amsterdam. Sentence (1b) has only the reading in which Mary lives in Amsterdam at speech time and has done so for the preceding three years. The reading that remains when the adverbial is in sentence-initial position is more specific about the time at which the event occurs, and therefore one would expect to see more initial-position adverbials in a narrative text, where the order of events is important. In testing this hypothesis on the ECI corpus, it was found that it is not the narrative/non-narrative distinction that results in a significant difference in initial-position adverbial usage; Instead, narratives with a large amount of flashback material have significantly more initial position adverbials, indicating that in order to accurately predict adverbial position a subclassification of the category "narrative" based on the amount of flashback material is needed

Liketa is not Almost

In this paper, I analyze the syntax and semantics of the approximative liketa as found in Appalachian English. Liketa is commonly translated to standard American English as almost. I present syntactic facts from extrapostion, yes/no question response, and hierarchy of projections which suggest that liketa is in fact a verb and not an adverb like almost. I use this syntactic analysis to show that a verbal decomposition analysis of the semantics of almost and German fast is not sufficient to explain liketa\u27s unique set of interpretations. Instead I propose that liketa\u27s interpretations are best captured with an analysis which says that liketa is best analyzed as an expression which generates sets of ordered alternatives following Penka (2006). I suggest that the alternatives receive their structure from the aspectual structure of the verb under liketa

Thirty-Fourth Annual Madrigal Dinners, November 1989

Circus Room, Bone Student Centerhttps://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/mdp/1017/thumbnail.jp

Washington University Record, January 19, 1989

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/1465/thumbnail.jp

Evaluating Centering for Information Ordering Using Corpora

In this article we discuss several metrics of coherence defined using centering theory and investigate the usefulness of such metrics for information ordering in automatic text generation. We estimate empirically which is the most promising metric and how useful this metric is using a general methodology applied on several corpora. Our main result is that the simplest metric (which relies exclusively on NOCB transitions) sets a robust baseline that cannot be outperformed by other metrics which make use of additional centering-based features. This baseline can be used for the development of both text-to-text and concept-to-text generation systems. </jats:p