27 January: DCLRS -- Isabel Gómez Txurruka, Friday, February 1, 4pm
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of January 2002 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2002 | Full index
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| Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar |
| DCLRS 2001/2002 |
| DCU TCD UCD |
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venue: Davis Lecture Theatre (Arts Building Room 2043)
Trinity College
time: 4:00-6:00, Friday, February 1
speaker: Isabel Gómez Txurruka
Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language
and Information (ILCLI)
Villa Asunción; Apdo. 220; 20080
Donostia-San Sebastián
title: And
abstract:
In the Gricean tradition, the semantics of the
conjunction 'and' is equivalent to that of the logical
conjunction (that is, with Grice, the semantics of
'and' is that 'p and q' is true iff 'p' is true and
'q' is true). This view, however, does not account
for several meaning variations of 'and' such as in (2)
versus (1):
1. a. Max fell; he broke his arm.
b. Max fell and he broke his arm.
2. a. Max fell; he slipped on a banana peel.
b. Max fell, and he slipped on a banana peel.
This led Bar-Lev and Palacas (1980) to propose a
temporal semantics for 'and.'
In this talk, we first show, with Blakemore and
Carston (1999), that 'and' is not temporally loaded
and, then, explore a commonsense idea---namely that
while sentence juxtaposition might be interpreted
either as discourse coordination or subordination,
'and' indicates coordination. We argue that the
semantics of 'and' includes a notion of coordination
expressed as the requirement of a common discourse
topic. This meaning characterizes a class of discourse
relations, including Narration and Result. Moreover,
this meaning is incompatible with Subordinators such
as Explanation. This view can directly account for
(1) and (2) above. We use SDRT to formalize these
ideas (cf. Lascarides and Asher 1993, Asher 1993).
SDRT already includes notions of coordinating and
subordinating discourse relations and the meaning of
'and' is related to this distinction. Similar
distinctions playing a crucial role in anaphora
resolution have also appeared in AI---cf. Scha and
Polanyi 1988, or Webber 1991. However, this
discourse-structure-based distinction has not been
well defined yet, and our approach could provide
independent motivation for it.
The Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar series is run
jointly by DCU (Dublin City University), TCD (Trinity College Dublin)
and UCD (University College Dublin).
The 2001/2002 seminar series is hosted by Trinity College with the
support of the Department of Computer Science, the Centre for Language
and Communication Studies, the Department of Germanic Studies, the
School of Irish, the Department of French and the Centre for Computing
and Language Studies.
For an indication of parts of recent seminar contents, see:
http://www.cs.tcd.ie/research_groups/clg/DCLRS.html
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of January 2002 | Index of year: 2002 | Full index