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Discourse Structure and Sentential Information Structure. An Initial Proposal

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Abstract

In this article we argue that discourse structure constrains the set ofpossible constituents in a discourse that can provide the relevantcontext for structuring information in a target sentence, whileinformation structure critically constrains discourse structureambiguity. For the speaker, the discourse structure provides a set of possible contexts for continuation while information structure assignment is independent of discourse structure. For the hearer, the information structure of a sentence together with discourse structure instructs dynamic semantics how rhematic information should be used to update the meaning representation of the discourse (Polanyi and van den Berg, 1996).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FX Palo Alto Laboratory, 3400 Hillview Ave., Bldg. 4, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, U.S.A.

    Livia Polanyi & Martin van den Berg

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, U.S.A.

    David Ahn

Authors
  1. Livia Polanyi
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  2. Martin van den Berg
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  3. David Ahn
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Polanyi, L., van den Berg, M. & Ahn, D. Discourse Structure and Sentential Information Structure. An Initial Proposal. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12, 337–350 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024187311998

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