scholarly journals Locating adverbials in discourse

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURE VIEU ◽  
MYRIAM BRAS ◽  
NICHOLAS ASHER ◽  
MICHEL AURNAGUE

This 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.

2000 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 173-207
Author(s):  
Michael Grabski

The paper starts with a semantic differentiation between the notions of sentence topic and discourse topic. Sentence topic is conceived of as part of a semantic predication in the sense of Y. Kim's work. Discourse topic is defined, as in N. Asher's Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, as a discourse constituent that comprises the content of (part of) the larger discourse. The main body of the paper serves to investigate the intricate connection between the two types of topic. For restricting the context of investigation, a specific relation between discourse constituents, Elaboration, is chosen. If Elaboration holds between two discourse constituents, one of them can be identified as the explicit discourse topic with respect to the other one. Whereas an elaborating sentence - with or without a sentence topic - is used to infer a 'dimension' for extending the discourse topic, the role of the sentence topic if it occurs is to mark an 'index' for predication along that dimension. The interaction of elaborating sentences and their topics is modelled by means of channel theoretic devices.'  


Author(s):  
Hans Kamp

This chapter is about the treatment of tense and aspect in Discourse Representation Theory. The focus is on the role that different tense forms and other sentence constituents with temporal and/or aspectual meaning components have on the interpretation of sentence sequences: how the occurrence of such a constituent in a sentence links its interpretation temporally or aspectually to that of the sentence of sentences preceding it. The concern on the discourse linking role of tenses and other sentence constituents led to DRT in the first place, with its architecture that is geared to deal with the systematic properties of incremental discourse interpretation. Novel about the chapter is its discussion of the distinction between temporal cross-sentential discourse links that are fully determined by the choice of tense forms alone and those which also rely on world knowledge and discourse relations. DRT work on sentence- and word-internal structure is not discussed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-141
Author(s):  
Piotr Stalmaszczyk

Meaning and the Dynamics of Interpretation brings together fourteen papers by Hans Kamp, whose research is concerned with formal linguistics, philosophy of language, logic, cognitive science and computer science. Central to this research are problems of presupposition, context dependency, vagueness of meaning, the dynamic character of interpretation, the issues contributing to the version of dynamic semantics known as Discourse Representation Theory, and associated with the dynamic turn in the study of meaning and interpretation.


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