Information Structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics

By Craige Roberts. 2012

915 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37d9ae7ba408f7d6eb121b1ad6cf772535173905

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Citations in the corpus

Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures (2016, background): “…of the focus phrase in the answer must include (or be identical to) the restriction of the wh-phrase in the question (e.g., Krifka 3:36 namely the question that sets the immediate goal of the discourse (Roberts 2012: (26)); this congruence qualifies the assertion as a relevant discourse move.”
On the negativity of negation (2010, methodology): “I seek to explain them in terms of the ways in which negative sentences engage the abstract questions under discussion (Roberts 1996; Schoubye 2009; Beaver & Clark 2008; Roberts, Simons, Beaver & Tonhauser 2009), and I offer some additional evidence for that proposal from the Switchboard Dialog Act…”
The meaning of plural definites: A decision-theoretic approach (2012, background): “13 The participants will need to choose the current QUD among the many possible and unresolved ones - while very important, the computation behind this choice lies outside the scope of this paper (but see Roberts (1996) for one view).”
Investigating the distribution of some (but not all ) implicatures using corpora and web-based methods (2015, background): “Their explanation is that scalar implicatures should only arise for sentences that address a contextual QUD that is about the constituent containing the scalar item.”
Belief as Question‐Sensitive (2018, background): “…account can be construed as a sort of 8 A number of dynamic semantic/pragmatic systems for questions (e.g., Hulstijn (1997), Groenendijk (1999); cf. Roberts (1996, 2012)) effectively assume that the common ground of a conversation should be modeled as a partitioned set of worlds, with the…”
Must, knowledge, and (in)directness (2016, background): “I assume that assertions are required to address a Question Under Discussion (QUD) which is determined by the discourse context, as proposed by Ginzburg (1995a,b), van Kuppevelt (1995), Roberts (2012), and Beaver and Clark (2008).”