Event Entry
New for: D1, D2
What and Who
FROM SENTENCE TO DISCOURSE: A PRAGUIAN FORMAL PERSPECTIVE
Date, Time and Location
Abstract
discourse analysis based on the Praguian framework of Functional Generative
Description of language (FGD). The framework of FGD is known for its
dependency-based approach and for a great deal of work done on the issues
of information structure, hereby referred to as the topic-focus
articulation (TFA) of a sentence.
In the first part of the talk we shall introduce some fundamental notions
of FGD.
In the second part we shall present a new logical grammar which uses
dependencies as basic categories. The grammar provides a means to analyse
sentences in terms of their deep structure, based on the original
generative description of FGD. The deep structure of a sentence represents
how strings of that sentence can be interpreted as heads, or as modifiers
expanding heads by specific dependency relations. The perspective taken is
thus inherently different from the phrase-oriented viewpoint. One of the
advantages of the perspective taken is that it provides a basis for a
structural way to establish the topic and the focus of a sentence.
The third part of the talk will be devoted to an extension of this
FGD-based approach towards discourse representation. We start out by
constructing a lambda-term representing (truth-semantically) the
topic-focus articulation of a sentence, given its deep structure.
Thereupon, we present a modification of a basic DRT fragment in which the
DRS corresponding to a sentence is constructed out of its lambda-term, and
the operation of merging DRS's is defined taking the topic-focus dichotomy
into account.
Contact