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<Paper uid="C86-1040">
  <Title>The Role of Inversion and PP-Fronting In Relating Discourse Elements: some implications for cognitive and computational models of Natural Language Processing</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> English at its simplest is an SVO, Subject Verb Object, language. However it is not limited to SVO order. Clefts, pseudo-clefts, inversion, topicalization, left dislocation and various types of fronting are instances of deviation from SVO order. Non-SVO orders are not exceptional or found only in obscure literary writing. They abound throughout writing and speech. An interesting question is what use do these structures do in English, and how can a cognitive or computational theory use such information? Non-SVO word order helps the reader (or listener) to construct a discourse representation. It is a heuristic devise for creating coherent and cohesive representations of text and for searching existing representations. In other words, it is a device for finding in long or medium term memory the relevant context, or discourse space, in which to embed and interpret the sentence being processed. It is a linguistic device used for changing the discourse focus (Sidncr 1978, 1983; Grosz 1978, 1981). It is important to note that no particular discourse representation construction schema is assumed in this claim but rather that this claim holds no matter what type of construction algorithm is used. Also, what is being proposed here is not a linguistic rule for constructing discourse representation but rather a principle (heuristic) for constructing them. That is a principle for organizing and searching discourse representations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> As a sentence is processed a representation is made of it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This representation consists of a label, which is a (syntactic and semantic) parse 2 of the first constituent cncountercd, followed by a parse of the whole sentence. Actually, one could have multiple labels that consisted of the NPs in the sentence,  under contract DAAG29-84-K-0060. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Computer Sciences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> I would like to thank Professor Robert F. Simmons for his support, help and criticisms.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4">  now English Will be used to represent what eventually will be a discourse representation of some sort. Parse is being used hcre in a general sense to mean &amp;quot;give the structure of&amp;quot;. The &amp;quot;structure&amp;quot; of course depends on the linguistic theory used to give the parses. Label: Mary, Johu, park D.R. : Mary kissed John in the park Two uses could be made of this system of &amp;quot;labels&amp;quot;* The first is to simply use the labels to index the text and to facilitate the search through the text. The second would be to use the labels as nodes in a semantic network. Thus in the discourse fragment, &amp;quot;A house stood in the forest. Outside stood an angel.&amp;quot; the label &amp;quot;outside &amp;quot;3 could be related to either the label &amp;quot;house&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;forest&amp;quot; or both via a &amp;quot;location&amp;quot; arc. Due to tile lack of space the former (index) nsc will be tile focus of this paper but note that it is indeed difficult to separate these two uses since it is necessary to locate ttle material necessary to construct a discourse space, i.e. even if one were only using a very restricted procedure for creating discourse representations one would still need to locate previous discourse items in order to resolve anaphora, and therefore create some sort of structured link from discourse to discourse.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In the sections that follow we will give linguistic motivation for this analysis. Due to the enormity of the urea and the limitation of space, only inversion and PP-fronting will be discussed. In the final section we will present the findings of a study done to see if this system of &amp;quot;labels&amp;quot; could be used to speed the construction of discourse representations, specifically the resolution of anaphora.</Paragraph>
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