ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004

Anaphora, connectives and resetting: prosodic and pragmatic parameters interactions in the marking of discourse structure

Cyril Auran, Daniel Hirst

This paper tackles the issue of the interaction of three types of linguistic cohesion markers. Automatic analyses of the prosodically annotated (British English) Aix-MARSEC corpus show that anaphoric pronouns and connectives, though often grouped into a general category of cohesion devices, do behave differently in relation with the phonetic realization of resettings. Anaphoric pronouns, more particularly, are demonstrated to interact with resettings in a hypothesized complex interplay of production and pragmatic constraints, whereas connectives are shown to have no significant effect on resettings.