Temporal connectives in a discourse context

We examine the role of temporal connectives in multi-sentence discourse. In certain contexts, sentences containing temporal connectives that are equivalent in termporal structure can fail to be equivalent in terms of discourse coherence. We account for this by offering a novel, formal mechanism for accommodating the presuppositions in temporal subordinate clauses. This mechanism encompasses both accommodation by discourse attachment and accommodation by temporal addition. As such, it offers a precise and systematic model of interactions between presupposed material, discourse context, and the reader's background knowledge. We show how the resuits of accommodation help to determine a discourse's coherence

Preventing false temporal implicatures: interactive defaults for text generation

Introduction Given the causal and temporal relations between events in a knowledge base, what are the ways they can be described in text? Elsewhere, we have argued that during interpretation, the reader-hearer H must infer certain temporal information from knowledge about the world, language use and pragmatics. It is generally agreed that processes of Gricean implicature help determine the interpretation of text in context. But without a notion of logical consequence to underwrite them, the inferences---often defeasible in nature---will appear arbitrary, and unprincipled. Hence, we have explored the requirements on a formal model of temporal implicature, and outlined one possible nonmonotonic framework for discourse interpretation (Lascarides & Asher [1991], Lascarides & Oberlander [1992a]). Here, we argue that if the writer-speaker S is to tailor text to H , then discourse generation can be informed by a similar formal model o

Cue Phrases in Discourse: Further Evidence for the Core:Contributor Distinction

this paper. It is therefore possible that Moore and Moser's nding generalises: there is a set of segments in which cue phrases occur sentence-initially, and a set of segments which can be analysed into a core and contributor (s), with the core rst; but these two sets are disjoint

Grice for graphics: Pragmatic implicature in network diagrams

This paper explores an alternative account, which relies on the notion of graphical implicature. Whether or not the current account is useful has broader significance, because if it is useful, it helps supply the first premise for the following argument: (i) there are certain parallels between pragmatic phenomena in natural language (NL) and graphical representation; (ii) formal techniques have been developed for modelling some of the NL phenomena; and thus (iii) once the graphical data are better-understood, we may be able to treat them with formal techniques from NL pragmatics. The paper has the following structure. First, we introduce the phenomena discussed by Petre and Green, and summarise their account. Then we introduce some key concepts from linguistic pragmatics, focussing on Grice's [1975] theory of implicature. We then indicate how Grice's ideas have been applied in the graphical domain, by Marks and Reiter [1990]. Finally, we show how the ideas apply to Petre and Green's observations, and relate the two accounts. 2 Network diagram