Introduction: Language-Specific Conditions for Discourse Linking and Appropriateness

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Peer Reviewe

CRPC-DB – A Discourse Bank for Portuguese

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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

Document Structuring à la SDRT

In this paper, the issue of document structuring is addressed. To achieve this task, we advocate that Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) is a most expressive discourse framework. Then we sketch a discourse planning mechanism which aims at producingas many paraphrastic document structures as possible from a set of factual data encoded into a logical form

Implicatures and hierarchies of presumptions

Implicatures are described as particular forms reasoning from best explanation, in which the para-digm of possible explanations consists of the possible semantic interpretations of a sentence or a word. The need for explanation will be shown to be triggered by conflicts between presumptions, namely hearer’s dialogical expectations and the presumptive sentence meaning. What counts as the best explanation can be established on the grounds of hierarchies of presumptions, dependent on dialogue types and interlocutors’ culture

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

Clause-internal coherence as presupposition resolution

Hobbs (2010) introduced ‘clause-internal coherence’ (CIC) to describe inferences in, e.g., ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to have led to the car-hitting. Cohen & Kehler (2021) argue that well-known pragmatic tools cannot account for CIC, motivating an enrichment account familiar from discourse coherence research. An outstanding question is how to compositionally derive CIC from coherence relations. This paper takes strides in answering this question. It first provides experimental support for the existence of CIC via offline evidence that attributive (non-)deverbal adjectives can trigger the same causal inferences within clauses that their predicative counterparts can trigger across clauses, albeit more weakly. To explain the experimental results, we use tools in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which allows us to show that causal inferences can be derived in various ways, depending on whether deverbal adjectives are used attributively or predicatively. If the former, they are presupposition triggers and the coherence relations Elaboration/Continuation compete with Background; if the latter, Explanation/Result compete with Background. These different competitions -- cashed out in terms of interaction between default axioms -- correlate with the difference in the relative salience of the causal inferences