Applicative Structures and Immediate Discourse in the Turkish Discourse Bank

Various discourse theories have argued for data structures ranging from the simplest trees to the most complex chain graphs. This paper investigates the structure represented by the explicit connectives annotated in the multiplegenre Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB). The dependencies that violate tree-constraints are analyzed. The effects of information structure in the surface form, which result in seemingly complex configurations with underlying simple dependencies, are introduced; and the structural implications are discussed. The results indicate that our current approach to local discourse structure needs to accommodate properly contained arguments and relations, and partially overlapping as well as shared arguments; deviating further from simple trees, but not as drastically as a chain graph structure would imply, since no genuine cases of structural crossing dependencies are attested in TDB.