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<Paper uid="J03-4002">
  <Title>c(c) 2003 Association for Computational Linguistics Anaphora and Discourse Structure</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="583" end_page="583" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6. Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this article, we have argued that discourse adverbials make an anaphoric, rather than a structural, connection with the previous discourse (section 2), and we have provided a general view of anaphora in which it makes sense to talk of discourse adverbials as being anaphoric (section 3). We have then shown that this view of discourse adverbials allows us to characterize a range of ways in which the relation contributed by a discourse adverbial can interact with the relation conveyed by a structural connective or inferred through adjacency (section 4), and then illustrated how discourse syntax and semantics can be treated as an extension of sentence-level syntax and semantics, using a lexicalized discourse grammar (section 5).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We are clearly not the first to have proposed a grammatical treatment of low-level aspects of discourse semantics (Asher and Lascarides 1999; Gardent 1997; Polanyi and van den Berg 1996; Scha and Polanyi 1988; Schilder 1997a, 1997b; van den Berg 1996), but we are the first to have recognized that the key to avoiding problems of maintaining a compositional semantics for discourse lies in recognizing discourse adverbials as anaphors and not trying to shoehorn everything into a single class of discourse connectives. Although we are not yet able to propose a solution to the problem of correctly resolving discourse adverbials or a way of achieving the Holy Grail of computing discourse syntax and semantics in parallel with incremental sentence processing, the proposed approach does simplify issues of discourse structure and discourse semantics in ways that have not before been possible.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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