Modality and Negation: An Introduction to the Special Issue

objects can be assertions, beliefs, facts, or eventualities. Discourse connectives and their arguments are assigned attribution-related features (Prasad et al. 2006) such as SOURCE (writer, other, arbitrary), TYPE (reflecting the nature of the relation between the agent and the abstract object), SCOPAL POLARITY of attribution, and DETERMINACY (indicating the presence of contexts canceling the entailment of attribution). The text spans signaling the attribution are also marked. Prasad et al. (2006) report that 34% of the discourse relations have some non-writer agent. SCOPAL POLARITY is annotated to identify cases when verbs of attribution (say, think, ...) are negated syntactically