The Role of Punctuation in Discourse Structure
Robert Dale · 2002
The first of these is clearly uncontroversial; it is only very recently, however, that researchers have begun to take the others seriously. As noted by Nunberg [1990], a pervasive bias towards taking the primary object of linguistic study to be the spoken form of language has led linguists to almost completely ignore phenomena that belong to the second and third of these categories. Nonetheles, it is clear that punctuation and graphical markers do play an important role in indicating structural relations in written discourse; if we are in the business of building systems for the automatic generation or analysis of written documents, we have to ensure that these systems incorporate an adequate model of these aspects of text.