Beyond Elaboration: The Interaction of Relations and Focus in Coherent Text

Abstract

This paper outlines a number of problems with RST's elaboration relation, and discusses a new model of text structure that results from leaving this relation out of the set of relations. In this model, trees of interclausal/intersentential relations account for the local coherence of a text, while its global coherence is accounted for by a separate device: global focus. 1 Introduction Many theories of discourse propose that a coherent text is one whose clauses, sentences and text spans (or perhaps the propositions expressed by these text units) stand in particular relations to one another. The basic motivation in these theories stems from the observation that a text is more than a sequence of independent units: whether a particular unit makes sense in a given discourse depends not only on this unit by itself, but also on its relationship with the other units in the discourse. This claim has been spelled out in many dierent ways, but there are two requirements that any such theor...