Multiple Discourse Relations on the Sentential Level in Japanese

Abstract

In the German government (BMBF) funded project Verbmobil, a semantic formalism Language for Underspecified Discourse Representation Structures (LUD) is used which describes several DRSs and allows for underspecification. Dealing with Japanese poses challenging problems. In this paper, a treatment of multiple discourse relation constructions on the sentential level is shown, which are common in Japanese but cause a problem for the formalism,. The problem is to distinguish discourse relations which take the widest scope compared with other scope-taking elements on the one hand and to have them underspecified among each other on the other hand. We also state a semantic constraint on the resolution of multiple discourse relations which seems to prevail over the syntactic c-command constraint.