Abstract
A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6 BibTeX info
Highlights
A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors
Information structure in discourse point in the discourse, and further, if we look at the strategy of questions in which it participates, it tells us where the discourse is going
For a simple wh-question, the q-alternative set denoted by the question is the set of propositions which can be derived by abstracting on its wh-phrase, applying this abstract in turn to all the things in the model which are of the same type as that denoted by the wh-phrase
Summary
Discourse is organized around a series of conversational goals and the plans or strategies which conversational participants develop to achieve them. We will see one way in which interlocutors can retrieve questions under discussion which are only implicit, never explicitly asked: I will argue that prosodic focus in English presupposes the type of question under discussion, a presupposition which enables the hearer, with some other contextually given clues, to reconstruct that question and its relation to the strategy being pursued This is just one example of the general case, which is modeled more abstractly in Planning Theory via Plan Inferencing Rules that permit us to infer interlocutors’ plans from other information in the common ground plus what is said.
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