The Polarity Parameter for Ellipsis Coherence

In this paper I argue that Catalan polarity particles (PPs) sí/no, també/tampoc, which one finds in some special realizations of ellipsis in Catalan, impose constraints on Discourse Structure. By virtue of their explicit or implicit markedness with respect to the [± neg] feature, I distinguish them as strong/weak PPs. I demonstrate that the polarity carried by these PPs, provides a test-bed for discourse coherence, supervising the processing of the preceding discourse in relation to the last state. It is claimed that such PPs inherit in the discourse the locality conditions that are present in the sentence-level in terms of comparison discourse relations like parallelism or similarity (signalled by sí/també) and contrast (signalled by no/tampoc). I propose a formalism within a general discourse representation theory known as Segmented drt (Asher, 1993)