Abstract
We consider two hypotheses about how rhetorical structure and QUD structure might come together to provide a more general pragmatic theory. Taking SDRT ([2]) and some basic principles from [18]’s QUD framework as starting points, we first consider the possibility that rhetorical relations can be modelled as QUDs, and vice versa. We ultimately reject this hypothesis in favor of the possibility that QUDs correspond to topics that bind together the members of complex discourse units.
We gratefully acknowledge support from the ERC grant 269427 and Marie Curie FP7 Grant, PCIG13-GA-2013-618550.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
See also [21] for a framework that combines QUDs and rhetorical relations.
- 2.
How a discourse is broken down into basic units can vary from theory to theory, but all rhetorical theories and QUD theories must take a stand on what constitutes a basic discourse move.
- 3.
SDRT does allow for violations of the RFC in cases that [1] calls discourse subordination, but such violations need to be explicitly signalled, e.g. Let’s go back to your first point.
- 4.
That the conversational goals and intentions of speakers are relevant for computing the pragmatic meaning of an utterance goes back at least to [9]. See also [7, 10, 12, 20]. See [8] for a QUD-based theory that shares many features with [18], but is importantly different in ways we cannot consider in this paper.
- 5.
This is the ordering adopted by [18] on page 15, clause (g.iii).
- 6.
Though see [3] for a discussion of the difficulties of defining discourse topic in SDRT.
- 7.
The cdu that represents the discourse as a whole is identical to the discourse graph as a whole, so we do not use special notation to label it in Fig. 2.
References
Asher, N.: Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1993)
Asher, N., Lascarides, A.: Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Asher, N.: Discourse topic. Theor. Linguist. 30, 163–201 (2004)
Asher, N., Vieu, L.: Subordinating and coordinating discourse relations. Lingua 115, 591–610 (2005)
Beaver, D., Clark, B.: Sense and Sensitivity. Blackwell, Oxford (2008)
Büring, D.: On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguist. Philos. 26, 511–545 (2003)
Carlson, L.: Dialogue Games: An Approach to Discourse Analysis (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy), vol. 17. Springer, Netherlands (1985)
Ginzburg, J.: The Interactive Stance. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2012)
Grice, H.P.: Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1989)
Grosz, B.J., Sidner, C.L.: Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Comput. Linguist. 12(3), 175–204 (1986)
Hamblin, C.: Questions in Montague English. Found. Lang. 1, 41–53 (1973)
Lewis, D.: Scorekeeping in a language game. J. Philos. Logic 8(1), 339–359 (1979)
Mann, W., Thompson, S.: Rhetorical structure theory: towards a functional theory of text organization. Text 8, 243–281 (1988)
Onea, E.: Potential Questions in Discourse and Grammar. University of Göttingen (2013). Habilitation Thesis
Polanyi, L.: A theory of discourse structure and discourse coherence. In: Eilfort, W.H., Kroeber, P.D., Peterson, K.L. (eds.) Papers from the General Session at the 21st Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago Linguistic Society (1985)
Polanyi, L., Scha, R.: A syntactic approach to discourse semantics. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING84), Stanford, pp. 413–419 (1984)
Roberts, C.: Context in dynamic interpretation. In: Horn, L., Ward, G. (eds.) Handbook of Contemporary Pragmatic Theory, pp. 197–220. Blackwell, Oxford (2004)
Roberts, C.: Information structure in discourse: towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semant. Pragmatics 5, 1–69 (2012)
Rooth, M.: A theory of focus interpretation. Nat. Lang. Semant. 1(1), 75–116 (1992)
Thomason, R.H.: Accommodation, meaning, and implicature: interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics. In: Cohen, P.R., Morgan, J., Pollack, M.E. (eds.) Intentions in Communication. System Development Foundation Benchmark, pp. 325–363. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1990)
Van Kuppevelt, J.: Directionality in discourse: prominence differences in subordination relations. J. Semant. 13(4), 363–395 (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hunter, J., Abrusán, M. (2017). Rhetorical Structure and QUDs. In: Otake, M., Kurahashi, S., Ota, Y., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10091. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50953-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50953-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50952-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50953-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)