Discourse semantics of s-modifying adverbials

Abstract

I wish to thank Bonnie Webber. Without her patience and her seemingly endless depths of insight, I might never have completed this thesis. I am enormously grateful for her guidance. I also owe many thanks to Ellen Prince. She is an intellectual leader at Penn who has helped many, including me, find a way through the jungle of discourse analysis. I am indebted to every professor who has taught me. Special thanks to Robin Clark for being a member of my dissertation committee. I am very lucky to have worked with Aravind Joshi. He is a continual source of knowledge in the DLTAG meetings. The field of computational linguistics has already benefited from his sentencelevel work; I fully expect he and Bonnie will produce similarly useful results with DLTAG. Also in DLTAG, Eleni Miltsakaki and Rashmi Prasad, and later Cassandre Creswell and Jason Teeple all provided stimulation and solace. Their great company and great effort on DLTAG projects taught me to appreciate how much can be done when minds work together. I look forward to the chance to work with them in the future. I am also thankful to Martha Palmer, Paul Kingsbury, and Scott Cotton for allowing me to work with them on the Propbank project and supplement both my income and my work in discourse. On a personal note, the Forbes, Finley, and Riley families deserve thanks for giving me love and diversion and balance and talking me through my education. Most of all, thanks to Enrico Riley, for being everything to me.