Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Rhetorical Structure and QUDs

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10091))

Included in the following conference series:

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

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    See also [21] for a framework that combines QUDs and rhetorical relations.

  2. 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. 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. 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. 5.

    This is the ordering adopted by [18] on page 15, clause (g.iii).

  6. 6.

    Though see [3] for a discussion of the difficulties of defining discourse topic in SDRT.

  7. 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

  1. Asher, N.: Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1993)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  2. Asher, N., Lascarides, A.: Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Asher, N.: Discourse topic. Theor. Linguist. 30, 163–201 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Asher, N., Vieu, L.: Subordinating and coordinating discourse relations. Lingua 115, 591–610 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Beaver, D., Clark, B.: Sense and Sensitivity. Blackwell, Oxford (2008)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  6. Büring, D.: On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguist. Philos. 26, 511–545 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Carlson, L.: Dialogue Games: An Approach to Discourse Analysis (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy), vol. 17. Springer, Netherlands (1985)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Ginzburg, J.: The Interactive Stance. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2012)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  9. Grice, H.P.: Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Grosz, B.J., Sidner, C.L.: Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Comput. Linguist. 12(3), 175–204 (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hamblin, C.: Questions in Montague English. Found. Lang. 1, 41–53 (1973)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Lewis, D.: Scorekeeping in a language game. J. Philos. Logic 8(1), 339–359 (1979)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Mann, W., Thompson, S.: Rhetorical structure theory: towards a functional theory of text organization. Text 8, 243–281 (1988)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Onea, E.: Potential Questions in Discourse and Grammar. University of Göttingen (2013). Habilitation Thesis

    Google Scholar 

  15. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  16. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Roberts, C.: Context in dynamic interpretation. In: Horn, L., Ward, G. (eds.) Handbook of Contemporary Pragmatic Theory, pp. 197–220. Blackwell, Oxford (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Roberts, C.: Information structure in discourse: towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semant. Pragmatics 5, 1–69 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Rooth, M.: A theory of focus interpretation. Nat. Lang. Semant. 1(1), 75–116 (1992)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. 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)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Van Kuppevelt, J.: Directionality in discourse: prominence differences in subordination relations. J. Semant. 13(4), 363–395 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

    Julie Hunter

  2. IRIT, CNRS, Toulouse, France

    Márta Abrusán

Authors
  1. Julie Hunter
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Márta Abrusán
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julie Hunter .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chiba University Graduate School of Engineering, Chiba, Japan

    Mihoko Otake

  2. University of Tsukuba, Tokyo, Japan

    Setsuya Kurahashi

  3. Fujitsu Laboratories, Kanagawa, Japan

    Yuiko Ota

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

  5. Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan

    Daisuke Bekki

Rights and permissions

Reprints 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)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation