On the Discourse Analysis in Korean Dialogues

On the Discourse Analysis in Korean Dialogues Ik-Hwan Lee Dept. of English Yonsei University Seoul 120-749 Email :ihlee@yonsei.ac.kr Minhaeng Lee Dept. of German Yonsei University Seoul 120-749 Email:leemh@yonsei.ac.kr ABSTRACT The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, we revise the well-known Centering Theory of anaphora resolution and propose the Controlled Information Packaging Theory (CIPT, for short). Second, we suggest a solution to the resolution of the antecedents of pronouns within the framework of CIPT. For this purpose, we select a dialogue of hotel reservation as a domain-restricted discourse, and discuss the characteristics of the distribution of pronouns. We suggest that we need to place the Slot-Link element on the top of the forward centering list. We claim that we need to establish a constraint on conceptual compatibility. As for the pronouns in the main dialogue, we propose a constraint of discourse command (d-command). 1. INTRODUCTION In Korean, the zero anaphora is very common in a domain restricted dialogue such as the one found in the situation of hotel reservation as follows': (1) U 1 :� iss e-yo? exist U2:(Is there a room free?) nalcca encey-sip-nikka? date when U3:(For what date are you going to make a reservation?) onul cenyek-ey. today night (I'd like to make a reservation for tonight) [U = Utterance, = zero pro-form] In the above example, a long discussed issue is how to establish the antecedent of the zero anaphors. In this study we propose a reasonable and reliable solution to the problem. The following five types of information structures are assumed in CIPT: (2) a. Link - Tail - Focus structure (L-T-F structure) b. Link- Focus structure (L-F structure) c. Tail - Focus structure (T-F structure) d. Focus structure (F structure) e. Slot Link - Focus structure (SL-F structure) The SL-F structure is the one defined by Lee & Lee(1998), in addition to the original information packaging theory of Vallduvi (1994). We adopt the concept of the frame theory devised in the Artificial Intelligence community. We thank Professor Jungyun Seo of Sogang University and Professor Hyunho Lee of Tongyang Technical College for allowing us to use the corpus they constructed for the Soft Science Project. In this paper we claim that the sentences with zero anaphors tend to exhibit the SL-F structure, on the basis of empirical evidence from actual dialogue corpora found in situations such as hotel reservation, theater talk, etc. As a next step we propose a revised ranking of the forward-looking centers in the sense of centering theory. It is claimed that the componential status of the information structure of the relevant utterance is revealed in the form of a hierarchy as follows: (3) SL-component > Speaker, Hearer > Subject > Indirect Object > Direct Object > Others With this hierarchy, we can calculate the reference of zero anaphora in any form of domain restricted dialogues. As for the overt anaphor, H. Lee(1998) postulates a constraint for the recovery of its antecedent at the moment when a sentence is uttered after returning from …

Content truncated to 500 words