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<Paper uid="E93-1018">
  <Title>A unification-based approach to multiple VP Ellipsis resolution*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="139" end_page="139" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Discourse grammar and VPE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> resolution The discourse grammar used builds on \[Polanyi and Scha 1984\]. More specifically, I assume that discourse is a tree structured entity whose well formedness can be described by a unification based discourse grammar. Under such a grammar, a discourse constituent is either a discourse relation, a clause or a discourse relation together with one or more discourse constituent(s). The grammar associates with each constituent a complex category which for the purpose of this paper, I will assume to consist of the six main attributes PHO, CAT, SEM, IN, OUT and RESTR. PHO, CAT, SEM unsurprisingly denote the phonology, the category and the semantic representation of the constituent described by the complex category. IN and OUT are attributes which represent the flow of anaphoric information, that is, IN represents the in-going context (where a context is a sequence of potential antecedents i.e. a sequence of VP categories) and OUT, the out-going context.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Finally RESTR is short for restriction and takes as value a constraint which must evaluate to true for the category to be well-formed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Conventions: In what follows I will omit any information that is not relevant to the purpose of the discussion. In particular, I shall omit irrelevant attributes in categories and any anaphoric information not pertaining to VPE (i.e. anaphoric pronominal information is ignored). Furthermore, the values of IS and OUT attributes (which should be VP categories) will be abbreviated to the SEM values of these categories. Finally, I will use the term a-clause as an abbreviation for antecedent clause and e-clause, for elliptical clause.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A simple example will illustrate the workings of the discourse grammar with respect to VPE resolution. Consider the discourse in (4).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4">  (4) (a) Jon \[1 likes Mary\] (b) and (c) Peter does $1 too.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  As indicated by the bracketed letters, this discourse includes three basic discourse constituents: the two clauses (a) and (c) and the discourse connective and. Consider first the category associated with (a). Ignoring irrelevant attributes, this category can be represented as follows2: ~For expository purposes, I assume here a sentenfial (rather than a discourse) semantics. In practice, however, the analysis is to be based on a discourse semantics and most importantly, the definitions of structural identity and of equivalence classes over relations (see below) axe to apply to discourse semantics representations and to discourse relations respectively.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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