Anaphora as an Indicator of Elaboration: A Corpus Study

Abstract

This article describes an investigation of the relationship between anaphora and relational discourse structure, notably the Elaboration relation known from theories like RST. A corpus was annotated on the levels of anaphoric structure and rhetorical structure. The statistical analysis of interrelations between the two annotation layers revealed correlations between specific subtypes of anaphora and Elaboration, indicating that anaphora can function as a cue for Elaboration. 1