Section: New Results

Annotation of discourse structures on the FTB

Participants : Laurence Danlos, Margot Colinet.

With the aim of annotating the French TreeBank (FTB, already annotated for syntax) with discourse information, we have been working on the first step of the project, namely identify all the occurrences of discourse connectives in the FTB. This raises problems for lexemes which are ambiguous with a discourse usage and other uses. In collaboration with Mathilde Dargnat (ATILF) and Grégoire Winterstein, we have been working on the preposition pour (around 1500 occurrences) and the adverb alors (300 occurrences). This work is the basis for a future annotation manual.

In parallel, we have been working on adverbial discourse connectives and published on the topic [17] . This paper focuses on the following question: does the only syntactic argument of an adverbial discourse connective correspond to its second semantic argument? It shows that this is not always the case, which is a problem for the syntax-semantics interface. This interface brings us to distinguish two classes of adverbial connectives we sketch the study of.