A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Anaphora and Discourse Structure

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistic

On the role of domain ontologies in the design of domain-specific visual modeling langages

Domain-Specific Visual Modeling Languages should provide notations and abstractions that suitably support problem solving in well-defined application domains. From their user’s perspective, the language’s modeling primitives must be intuitive and expressive enough in capturing all intended aspects of domain conceptualizations. Over the years formal and explicit representations of domain conceptualizations have been developed as domain ontologies. In this paper, we show how the design of these languages can benefit from conceptual tools developed by the ontology engineering community