The Effect of Establishing Coherence in Ellipsis and Anaphora Resolution

This paper presents a new model of anaphoric processing that utilizes the establishment of coherence relations between clauses in a discourse. We survey data that comprises a currently stalemated argument over whether VP-ellipsis is an inherently syntactic or inherently semantic phenomenon, and show that the data can be handled within a uniform discourse processing architecture. This architecture , which revises the dichotomy between ellip-sis vs. Model Interpretive Anaphora given by Sag and Hankamer (1984), is also able to accommodate divergent theories and data for pronominal reference resolution. The resulting architecture serves as a baseline system for modeling the role of cohesive devices in natural language.