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<Paper uid="W04-0203">
  <Title>Using a probabilistic model of discourse relations to investigate word order variation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Like speakers of any natural language, speakers of English potentially have many different word orders in which to encode a single meaning. One key factor in speakers' use of certain non-canonical word orders in English is their ability to contribute information about syntactic and semantic discourse relations. Explicit annotation of discourse relations is a difficult and subjective task. In order to measure the correlations between different word orders and various discourse relations, this project utilizes a model in which discourse relations are approximated using a set of lower-level linguistic features, which are more easily and reliably annotated than discourse relations themselves. The featural model provides statistical evidence for the claim that speakers use non-canonicals to communicate information about discourse structure.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>