Because We Say So

Abstract

In this paper, we show that contingency connectives, which mark causal and conditional relations (PDTB Group, 2008), restrict the possible interpretations of reports in their scope in a way that many other connectives, such as contrastive connectives, do not. We argue that this result has immediate implications for the semantics of causal relations and for the annotation of implicit connectives. In particular, it shows that the assumption, implicit in some work on NLP, that the semantics of explicit connectives can be translated to implicit connectives is not anodyne.