Preferred Argument Structure For Discourse Understanding

The main purpose of communication is to exchange information. Any discourse understanding model should be able to process the flow of information throughout the entire text. According to Du Bois (1987)'s studies of information flow in discourse across a number of languages, information distribution among argument positions in clauses is by no means random, but cemdn grammatical patterns tend to recur consistently. He thus formulated a Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) for the preferential structural configurations of arguments. In our examination of Chinese narrative discourse, the language also displays PAS, yet the Chinese PAS challenges tim universality of the one Du Bois proposed. Based on the quantity and distribution of lexical arguments and new referents across grammatical roles in discourse, it is realized that Chinese PAS also maintains one new argument at most within a basic information processiug unit. Since new referents in Chinese have to be encoded in full NP form, it is thus less likely to have more than one lexical argument within a clause. Moreover, this single new argument appears preferentially in the O role, rather than the A and S roles Du Bois's PAS formulates. Since the structure of information flow has a corresponding grammatical patterning, both grammatical and pragmatic processing can be carried out simultaneously, in that the information status of an argument can be identified by virtue of grammatical analysis. Althougll PAS is neither universal nor categorical, it can function in a discourse understanding model as heuristic device to process the information structure of a connected spoken discourse. According to Du Bois (1987)'s studies of information flow in discourse across a number of languages, information distribution among argument positions is neither arbitrary nor random, but certain grammatical patterns are preferred over others, especially they tend to recur consistently in a connected spoken discourse, hi other words, the structure of information flow has a corresponding grammatical patterning. Those recurrent patterns, which indeed reflect speakers' actual language use, are formulated as Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) The PAS he formulated comprises the following constraints: One Lexical Argument Constraint to avoid more than one referent in full NP form per clause, Non-Lexical A Constraint to have the single lexical referent not appearing in the A role, One New Argument Constraint to avoid more than one referent carrying new information per clause, Given A Constraint to have the new referent not appeariug in the A role. However, in examining Chinese …