Abstract
This paper deals with the discursive effects of the use of emphatic Negative Polarity Items and Free Choice Items such as any. In this work, we show that the use of the emphatic any, be it an NPI or an FCI, has a direct effect on the introduction of subsequent discourse segments. Our theoretical observations are backed up by experimental results. To account for the data, an explicit link between two probabilistic approaches to natural language semantics is proposed. The first one deals with the semantics of NPIs and FCIs, respectively van Rooy (2003), Jayez (2010), and the second one tackles the interpretation of discourse markers, Merin (1999).. It is shown that, modulo some formal tinkering, the two accounts interact nicely together to explain the data.
Many thanks to M. Mameni, E. Henestroza for their native competence and to Y. Choi and D. Tribout for fruitful discussion.
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Colinet, M., Winterstein, G. (2012). Emphatic NPI/FCI and Adversative Discourse Relations, a Probabilistic Approach. In: Okumura, M., Bekki, D., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7258. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32090-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32090-3_4
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