AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4   Info

Expert Audience

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Saarbrücken

The Information Structure (IS) of a sentence reflects an underlying
ontology of the speaker's or hearer's attentional state and
communicative intentions. But attention and intentions
transcend the sentence, and therefore a complete account of natural
language semantics requires understanding how IS projects into
discourse. Such an account must start from how IS operates within a
sentence, and then capture how IS contributes to and makes use of the
evolving discourse context.

The conception of IS we are working with originates in the Prague
School works (Mathesius, Firbas, Sgall, Hajicova). For the relation
between IS and intonation in English we adopt Steedman's approach. We
also build on Steedman's formalization of IS in terms of Rooth's
alternative set semantics.

Our current work concerns how IS effects the interpretation of clauses
or sentences related by discourse connectives and how this effect can
be expressed in a formal procedure for IS-sensitive discourse updating.

Discourse connectives assert a relation between two discourse
units. However, more can be conveyed in such construction than what is
asserted. For example, Halliday defines the concession relation as
conveying "if P then contrary to expectation Q", i.e., an expectation
that the construction appeals to but does not explicitly assert.

A number of authors have treated such additionally conveyed meanings
derived from discourse connectives as (pragmatic) presupposition,
more precisely, conventional implicatures. We are arguing that what is
conventionally implicated is influenced by the IS of the relata.

In this talk, the effect of IS will be discussed in detail for several
connectives used for causal and non-causal relations. This includes
the English 'because' (for a positive causal relation), 'otherwise'
(for a negative causal relation), 'although' (both for a causal and a
non-causal relation). The same observations concerning the effect of
IS hold also for the respective discourse connectives in Czech.

Werner Saurer

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