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<Paper uid="P04-1087">
  <Title>Acquiring the Meaning of Discourse Markers</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Discourse markers
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Discourse markers are lexical items (possibly multiword) that signal relations between propositions, events or speech acts. Examples of discourse markers are given in Tables 1, 2 and 3. In this paper we will focus on a subclass of discourse markers known as structural connectives. These markers, even though they may be multiword expressions, function syntactically as if they were coordinating or subordinating conjunctions (Webber et al., 2003).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The literature contains many different classifications of discourse markers, drawing upon a wide range of evidence including textual cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976), hypotactic conjunctions (Martin, 1992), cognitive plausibility (Sanders et al., 1992), substitutability (Knott, 1996), and psycholinguistic experiments (Louwerse, 2001). Nevertheless there is also considerable agreement. Three dimensions of classification that recur, albeit under a variety of names, are polarity, veridicality and type. We now discuss each of these in turn.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.1 Polarity
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Many discourse markers signal a concession, a contrast or the denial of an expectation. These markers have been described as having the feature polarity=NEG-POL. An example is given in (1).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1">  (1) Suzy's part-time, but she does more work than the rest of us put together. (Taken from  Knott (1996, p. 185)) This sentence is true if and only if Suzy both is part-time and does more work than the rest of them put together. In addition, it has the additional effect of signalling that the fact Suzy does more work is surprising -- it denies an expectation. A similar effect can be obtained by using the connective and and adding more context, as in (2) (2) Suzy's efficiency is astounding. She's part-time, and she does more work than the rest of us put together.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The difference is that although it is possible for and to co-occur with a negative polarity discourse relation, it need not. Discourse markers like and are said to have the feature polarity=POS-POL. 1 On 1An alternative view is that discourse markers like and are underspecified with respect to polarity (Knott, 1996). In this the other hand, a NEG-POL discourse marker like but always co-occurs with a negative polarity discourse relation.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> The gold standard classes of POS-POL and NEG-POL discourse markers used in the learning experiments are shown in Table 1. The gold standards for all three experiments were compiled by consulting a range of previous classifications (Knott, 1996; Knott and Dale, 1994; Louwerse, 2001). 2</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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