on Marcu's Milon example

Bill Mann bill_mann at SIL.ORG
Fri Jan 14 18:20:43 UTC 2000


There are possibilities not yet mentioned.  The example:

>         [The lore of ancient Greece recalls an Olympic athlete who was
> determined to become the strongest person in the world. Every day
> Milon of Croton would pick up a calf, raise it above his head and
> carry it around a stable. As the calf grew, so did Milon's strength,
> until eventually he was able to lift the full-grown cow.
>
>         Milon, who won the wrestling contest five times,
> intuitively grasped one of the basic tenets of contemporary sports
> science.] [Progressive resistance training - the stressing of muscles
> with steadily increasing loads - is something well understood by the more
> than 10,000 athletes from 197 countries who will go to Atlanta, Ga.,
> next month for the centennial of the modern Olympic Games. (...)

If the break is put at the paragraph break, rather than with the [ ] structures,
then the Interpretation relation is possible.  Here is the story; here is it's
interpretation or significance.

OR, using the [ ], the second part can be seen as Elaboration on "basic tenets
of contemporary sports science."

There has been a lot of innovation on the Elaboration relation.  In classical
RST, Elaboration is supported by any of these pairs:

set :: member
abstraction :: instance
whole :: part
process :: step
object :: attribute
generalization :: specific

For this example, several of these can be seen to fit, 3 or more.  So which one
is it?  In CRST the observer need not say or know.  It's elaboration, so it's
Elaboration.

We haven't finished.

Bill Mann





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