DISCOURSE COMMITMENT

1. (Pragmatics) The set of publicly held beliefs that can be ascribed to the author of a text or a hypothesis. | Andrew Hickl and Jeremy Bensley, 2007
2. (Pragmatics) A commitment is a self-binding resolution to act as though a given proposition is true. This definition has its roots in Austin (1962), who argues that the effect of speech acts involves "committing" the speaker to "certain future conduct." The idea that commitments are propositional in nature is due to (Hamblin 1970), which allows for immediate parallels with the idea of the common ground.
    Formally, commitments can be captured by articulating the common ground into a number of discrete sets for propositions that the individual interlocutors are committed to. These sets are known by various names, including commitment-stores (Hamblin 1970), commitment-slates (Hamblin 1971), and speaker beliefs (Gunlogson 2003), although I will employ Farkas and Bruce's (2010) discourse commitments, abbreviated as DCs. To arrive at the classical common ground, one need simply intersect the interlocutors' commitments; whatever lies within this set is shared. | Oliver Northrup, 2014

DISCOURSE DEIXIS

1. (Pragmatics) There is ample evidence that subsequent reference can be made to some aspect of a sequence of clauses in text. Also not in dispute is the fact that such subsequent reference is most often done via deictic pronouns: Of 79 instances of prominal reference_m to clausal material found in five written texts, only 14 (~18%) used the pronoun it while the other 65 (~82%) used either this or that (17 instances of that and 48 of this).
    On the other hand, looking at all instances of pronominal reference_m using it to discourse entities evoked by NPs, of 41 such references, 39 (~95%) used it while only 2 (~5%) used this or that. Because of this, I will call this type of reference "discourse deixis".
    The first thing to note about discourse deixis is that the referent_m is often distinct from the things described in the sequence. For example,

   There's two houses you might be interested in:

   House A is in Palo Alto. It's got 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, and was built in 1950. It's on a quarter acre, with a lovely garden, and the owner is asking $425K. But that's all I know about it.

   House B is in Portola Vally. It's got 3 bedrooms, 4 baths and a kidney-shaped pool, and was also built in 1950. It's on 4 acres of steep wooded slope, with a view of the mountains. The owner is asking $600K. I heard all this from a friend, who saw the house yesterday.

   Is that enough information for you to decide which to look at?

   In this passage, that in the second paragraph does not refer to House A (although all instances of it do): rather it refers to the description of House A presented there. Similarly (all) this in the third paragraph does not refer to House B (although again, all instances of it do): rather it refers to the description of House B presented there. That in the fourth paragraph refers to the descriptions of the two houses taken together.
    The next thing to note is that the only sequences of utterances that appear to allow such pronominal reference, are ones that intuitively constitute a discourse segment. | Bonnie Lynn Webber, 1988
2. (Pragmatics) Or, text deixis. Deictic reference to a portion of a discourse or discourse representative relative to the speaker's "current" "location" in the discourse. Therefore, discourse deixis is deixis in text. Discourse deixis has to do with the choice of lexical or grammatical elements which indicate or otherwise refer to some portion or aspect of the ongoing discourse—something like, for example, the former. Most commonly, the terms of discourse deixis are taken from systems of deictic and non-deictic time semantics, for the very good reason that any point in a discourse can be thought of as a point in time—the time at which that portion of the discourse is encoded or decoded—with preceding portions of the discourse conceived as occurring earlier in time, later portions thought of as occurring later in time. Expressions in discourse deixis taken directly from non-deictic time semantics are words like earlier and later, and phrases like the preceding X and the following X. So, a text, whether in its written or oral realization, is closely related to the concepts of space and time. Since discourse unfolds in time, it seems natural that time deictic or space-deictic words can be used to refer to portions of the discourse as in the following examples:
   1. I bet you haven't heard this joke.
   2. That was the funniest story I've ever heard.
   3. There's a nice point to discuss in class.
   4. Here's a powerful argument.
    An interesting point about the use of spatial deictic terms to express discourse deixis is that the proximal-distal distinction in space deixis acquires temporal status in relation to the unfolding of the text. | Youwen Yang, 2011

DISCOURSE MARKER
(Grammar) Any of a variety of units whose function is within a larger discourse rather than an individual sentence or clause. E.g., Greek καί (kai 'and'), γάρ (gar 'for'), δέ (de 'but'). | Gunnel Melchers and Philip Shaw, 2013

DISCOURSE PARTICLE

1. (Pragmatics) Lexemes such as like, well, oh, you know are commonly used in spoken English, yet native speakers, if asked, would be unable to explain why they use such words or what they mean. In reality, such lexemes have legitimate linguistic functions as "discourse particles", which indicate logical relationships between utterances, anticipate the following items, and mark other discourse functions.
    These DPs perform a number of important sociolinguistic functions. For example, well indicates a dispreferred or unexpected response or a transition; you know indicates foregrounding or common knowledge with deference to face-politeness; and like marks new or salient information. Some act as fillers for pauses (hmm, uh), and others may also be extended for use as fillers. These and other markers are necessary for not only making speech sound natural, but also for providing smooth transitions, indicating logical flow of information, and filling otherwise awkward pauses. | English Wiki contributors, 2023
2. (Pragmatics) Or, modal particle. Grosz (2016) characterizes German discourse particles as "a closed class of functional (= grammatical [AvK ML]) elements that contribute to common ground management in the spirit of Krifka (2008)". This means that they encode pragmatic instructions to the addressee on the relation between the propositional content of the clause and the common ground between speaker and hearer.
    Particles are used abundantly in spoken Dutch and German. They are presuppositional in the sense that they express the speaker's response to shared knowledge between speaker and audience in the common ground/context. Particles form a closed word class, they have an invariant form and are uninflected. They are typically unstressed, and they occur in fixed positions in the clause. | Ans van Kemenade and Meta Links, 2020
3. (Pragmatics) Discourse particles fulfil many different functions. They contribute to text structuring, dialogue management, turn-taking, politeness, and more. Research-problem areas include: definition; the functional spectrum of the items considered; the model of polyfunctionality proposed; and the broader framework of the model. | Kersten Fischer, 2021
4. (Pragmatics) These particles form part of a heterogeneous class of elements that have traditionally been subsumed under umbrella terms such as Modalpartikeln 'modal particles' (Weydt 1977, Thurmair 1989, Meibauer 1994), Abtönungspartikeln 'downtoners' (Weydt 1969), and Diskurspartikeln 'discourse particles’ (Abraham 1991, Kratzer 1999, Zimmermann 2011).
    The term "Modalpartikeln" 'modal particles' is most prominent in German linguistics, where these particles are classified as a separate part of speech (Pittner and Berman 2015). However, Thurmair (1989) emphasizes that the notion of "modality" in the label "modal particles" historically originated as a vague notion that roughly corresponds to "making a non-truth-conditional contribution". It should thus not be confused with the currently more widespread use of the term modality in the context of (sub-)sentential modality (as in Kratzer 1981, 1991, and Portner 2009); sentential modality is typically exemplified by modal auxiliaries such as may and by modal adverbs such as maybe.
    As a consequence, the recent move (particularly in English texts) of using the label "discourse particles" (instead of "modal particles") is justified by a goal of avoiding terminological confusion.
    For German, Thurmair (1989) lists seventeen elements of this class (aber, auch, bloß, denn, doch, eben, eigentlich, einfach, etwa, halt, ja, mal, nur, ruhig, schon, vielleicht, wohl), though the exact number is unclear. | Patrick G. Grosz, 2016

DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION STRUCTURE
A discourse representation structure (DRS) is a mental representation built up by the hearer as the discourse unfolds. A DRS consists of two parts: a universe of so-called discourse referents, which represent the objects under discussion, and a set of DRS-conditions which encode the information that has accumulated on these discourse referents. The following DRS represents the information that there are two individuals, one of which is a farmer, the other a donkey, and that the former chased the latter:

1. [x, y: farmer(x), donkey(y), chased(x,y)]

2. A farmer chased a donkey.

DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION THEORY

1. (Semantics) One approach to dynamic semantics is discourse representation theory (DRT, Kamp 1981). Meanings in DRT are so-called discourse representation structures (DRSs). These structures are a type of database that contains specific pieces of information. In and of itself a DRS is a static object, but DRT can be said to be a dynamic semantic framework because it allows us to understand the process of composing meanings as a process of merging DRSs. In this way, information change becomes an integral part of the interpretation process. | Rick Nouwen, Adrian Brasoveanu, Jan van Eijck, and Albert Visser, 2022
2. (Semantics) Two features that set DRT apart from other varieties of dynamic semantics is that it is representational and non-compositional. In the 1980s, the founding years of dynamic semantics, these features made DRT a controversial theory, though by now those controversies have abated. DRT's main innovation, beyond the Montagovian paradigm which was then considered orthodox, is that it introduced a level of mental representations, called discourse representation structures (DRSs). The basic idea is rather straightforward. It is that a hearer builds up a mental representation of the discourse as it unfolds, and that every incoming sentence prompts additions to that representation. This picture has always been commonplace in the psychology of language. DRT's principal tenet is that it should be the starting point for semantic theory, too.
     A theory of the DRT family consists of the following ingredients:
   1. A formal definition of the representation language, consisting of:
      1. A recursive definition of the set of all well-formed DRSs.
      2. A model-theoretic semantics for the members of this set.
   2. A construction procedure, which specifies how to extend a given DRS when a sentence comes in.
     Technically, this is very similar to earlier work in formal semantics, with two exceptions: the interpretation process always takes the previous discourse into account, and the level of semantic representations is claimed to be essential. | Bart Geurts, David Beaver, and Emar Maier, 2020

DISCOURSE TOPIC
(Discourse) The central participant or idea of a stretch of connected discourse or dialogue. The topic is what the discourse is about. The notion is often confused with the related notion of sentence-level topic/theme, which is frequently defined as "what the sentence is about" (Sapir 1921). Discourse topics have been of considerable interest to linguists because of the relations between the topic of a discourse and various aspects of the grammatical structure of the sentence, including strategies for referent-tracking (including the use of voice [Givón 1994], inversion [Zúñiga 2006], switch-reference markers, and obviation), topic-chaining, and pronominalization. | Wikipedia, 2022

DISCOURSE UNIT
(Discourse) DUs have been studied as basic analytic units in research on cross-linguistic comparative analysis of spontaneous speech segmentation (Park 2002). Technically, a DU was characterized as a part of an utterance including a predicate and the predicate's key arguments, and was structurally encoded as a clause. The main predicate was the semantic core of the DU, and annotators used it as a clue to the boundaries of a DU. | Zhang, Li, et al, 2021

Page Created By Split December 17, 2023

 

B a c k   T o   I n d e x