The logical foundations of discourse interpretation

MaRDI QIDQ4218522zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Nicholas M. Asher

Publication date 21 June 1999

zbMATH Keywords

discourse interpretationdiscourse representationdiscourse semanticsMontague Grammarpragmatic interpretation

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations (03A05) Logic of natural languages (03B65) Knowledge representation (68T30)

Review text

I will try to provide a guide to some strategies for building theories of discourse interpretation. I will begin with a simple and now standard semantic approach to discourse interpretation, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) without eventualities. I will then add in steps components needed for pragmatic interpretation. The approaches become more complex, but each bit of additional complexity lets us analyze some phenomenon or represent some bit of pragmatic reasoning that we were not able to before. The end result will be a theory of the semantic-pragmatic interface, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory or SDRT. Like DRT, SDRT exploits representations to model discourse contexts and to determine the semantic effects of discourse structure. Finally, a question that should be asked in this context, is why should any of this be of interest to logicians? Like formal semantics, discourse semantics is an area of application for logical techniques. The few theorems mentioned in this text are not terribly surprising nor do they introduce any new formal techniques unfamiliar to logicians. But discourse semantics has uncovered some new logical problems that were not part of standard formal semantics and could not easily be formulated within the framework of higher order intensional logic, the logical framework of Montague Grammar. It is my hope that some of these problems and the attempts that semanticists have made to formalize them will be of interest to logicians and may prompt them to investigations in these areas. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0893.00029].

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Cited in

(3)

• Discourse interpretation as model selection -- a probabilistic approach
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1523022 (Why is no real title available?)
• A hybrid logic formalization of information structure sensitive discourse interpretation

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