Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to reveal what the correlation between the discourse unit and its meaning is. Here I tried to show what can be called as a discourse unit. I accept the criteria Grosz and Sidner(1986) suggested for, which is (a) linguistic structure, (b) intention structure, and (c) attention state. According to the criteria, a discourse unit should have a distinct intention(kind of discourse function) and internal information structures to make it cohesive, besides its linguistic units included. Though it is not easy to define a discourse unit formally, we can try to assess some hierarchical relations within a discourse. About the meaning of a discourse, we need to separate the explicit meaning and the implicit meaning of it. Utterances within a discourse are situationally constrained within the context(discourse domain) they occur. Therefore, to interpret the meaning of the discourse clearly, we need to make explicit all the meanings of utterances within the discourse first. And then, we should evaluate them considering other cognitive structures human minds have in common, e.g. plan, frame, schema, script, etc. and stretching all our inferential ability to exploit all the common knowledge available at the moment.
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