SDRT and Continuation Semantics

International audienceSegmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) provides a dynamic semantics for discourse that exploits a rich notion of discourse structure. According to SDRT, a text is segmented into constituents related to each other by means of rhetorical relations; the resulting structure, known as a segmented discourse representation structure or SDRS has various semantic effects. This theory has shown how discourse structure makes contributions to the interpretation of a variety of linguistic phenomena, including tense, modality, presupposition, the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns and ellipsis. SDRT exploits dynamic semantics to interpret SDRSs. We investigate here the advantages of integrating SDRT within continuation style semantics

Testing SDRT's Right Frontier

The Right Frontier Constraint (RFC), as a constraint on the attachment of new constituents to an existing discourse structure, has important implications for the interpretation of anaphoric elements in discourse and for Machine Learning (ML) approaches to learning discourse structures. In this paper we provide strong empirical support for SDRT's version of RFC. The analysis of about 100 doubly annotated documents by five different naive annotators shows that SDRT's RFC is respected about 95% of the time. The qualitative analysis of presumed violations that we have performed shows that they are either click-errors or structural misconceptions

Understanding Focus: Pitch, Placement and Coherence

This paper presents a novel account of focal stress and pitch contour in English dialogue. We argue that one should analyse and treat focus and pitch contour jointly, since (i) some pragmatic interpretations vary with contour (e.g., whether an utterance accepts or rejects; or whether it implicates a positive or negative answer); and (ii) there are utterances with identical prosodic focus that in the same context are infelicitous with one contour, but felicitous with another. We offer an account of two distinct pitch contours that predicts the correct felicity judgements and implicatures, outclassing other models in empirical coverage or formality. Prosodic focus triggers a presupposition, where what is presupposed and how the presupposition is resolved depends on prosodic contour. If resolving the presupposition entails the proffered content, then the proffered content is uninteresting and hence the utterance is in-felicitous. Otherwise, resolving the presupposition may lead to an implicature. We regiment this account in SDRT

Intonation and discourse : biased questions

This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse

Exploring a type-theoretic approach to accessibility constraint modelling

The type-theoretic modelling of DRT that [degroote06] proposed features continuations for the management of the context in which a clause has to be interpreted. This approach, while keeping the standard definitions of quantifier scope, translates the rules of the accessibility constraints of discourse referents inside the semantic recipes. In this paper, we deal with additional rules for these accessibility constraints. In particular in the case of discourse referents introduced by proper nouns, that negation does not block, and in the case of rhetorical relations that structure discourses. We show how this continuation-based approach applies to those accessibility constraints and how we can consider the parallel management of various principles

Complex discourse units and their semantics

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Locating adverbials in discourse

International audienceThis article analyses Locating Adverbials (LAs) such as 'un peu plus tard', 'ce matin', 'deux kilomètres plus loin' (a little later, this morning, two kilometers further) when they are dislocated to the left of the sentence (IP Adjuncts cases). Although not discourse connectives, in such a position, they seem to play an important part in structuring discourse. It is this contribution of LAs to discourse that we tackle, providing a descriptive analysis and a formal account grounded on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In particular, we deal with the frame introducer role of the LAs and with spatio-temporal interpretations of these markers occurring in trajectory descriptions

A semantics and pragmatics for the pluperfect

We offer a semantics and pragmatics of the pluperfect in narrative discourse. We examine in a formal model of implicature, how the reader's knowledge about the discourse, Gricean-maxims and causation contribute to the meaning of the pluperfect. By placin

D-STAG: a Formalism for Discourse Analysis based on SDRT and using Synchronous TAG

We propose D-STAG, a new formalism for the automatic analysis of discourse. The analyses computed by d-stag are hierarchical discourse structures annotated with discourse relations, which are compatible with discourse structures computed in sdrt. A discursive STAG grammar pairs up trees anchored by discourse connectives with trees anchored by (functors associated with) discourse relations.D-STAG est un nouveau formalisme pour l'analyse automatique de discours