Semantics and Pragmatics· 2012
Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics
- 1,902citations
- 2012year
Short summary
A new framework models discourse as a game where context is a scoreboard of 'questions under discussion', integrated with dynamic compositional semantics.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Discourse is modeled as a game with context as a scoreboard.
- Context is organized around 'questions under discussion' by interlocutors.
- Utterances must address the current question under discussion to be relevant.
- Prosodic focus in English utterances typically reflects the question under discussion.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6 BibTeX info
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Semantics and Pragmatics, 2012 · DOI ↗
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Field: Language and Linguistics
Language and LinguisticsArts and Humanities