Regina Weinert and Jim Miller:
Cleft constructions in spoken language
Previous accounts of clefts in terms of focus are too narrow, and the
presentation of a novel, maximal instantiation of a variable becomes a
background property. The focusing function of clefts is crucially
related to thematization and deixis and not to the givenness of the WH
clause. The focusing function is separate from the information carried
by the cleft components. IT and reverse clefts function as much to
specify the clefted constituent as the variable in the WH clause. The
macro-textual functions of the clefts are determined by the nature of
the deictic. Reverse clefts, with a TH deictic, highlight the
immediately preceding discourse, delay its progress and consolidate the
exchange of information. WH clefts, with an indefinite WH deictic,
point forward and propel the discourse onwards. IT clefts are neutral
with respect to direction and are preferred for the expression of
contrast.
(February 1993; 34 pages)
Ref. No: HCRC/RP-41 Price: UKL 1.30
Robin Cooper:
A note on the relationship between linguistic theory and linguistic
engineering
We indicate some aspects of the relationship between theoretical work on
natural language and linguistic engineering. We are concerned with the
kind of theoretical work being undertaken in the {\sc dyana project
(``Dynamic Interpretation of Natural Language''), an {\sc esprit basic
research action which began its second phase in October 1992. In
particular we try to relate this work to stochastic approaches to
linguistic engineering, which initially might seem diametrically opposed
to the kind of work undertaken in {\sc dyana. We will argue, however,
that the theoretical and stochastic approaches may be seen as making
complementary contributions to the future needs of linguistic
engineering.
(February 1993; 10 pages)
Ref. No: HCRC/RP-42 Price: UKL 0.70
Jean Carletta, Richard Caley and Stephen Isard:
A System Architecture for Simulating Time-Constrained Language
Production
The goal of our research is to simulate the human production of language
under time constraints. In this paper, we briefly discuss two
behaviours arising from time pressure, {\it hesitation and {\it
spontaneous self-repair, which we have identified from a corpus of human
dialogues. We then go on to describe a system architecture, adapted
from work in real-time systems and Levelt's model for a speaker, which
we intend to use in building the simulator.
(February 1993; 10 pages)
Ref. No: HCRC/RP-43 Price: UKL 0.70
Enric Vallduvi:
Information packaging: A survey
Information packaging is the speaker's manipulation of sentence
structure in order to present propositional content to the hearer in
different ways according to his or her assumptions about the knowledge
and attentional state of the latter. Different languages exploit word
order and prosody in different ways to express information packaging. In
order to establish the basic range of variation in the realization of
information packaging across languages, a set of of informational
primitives that are crosslinguistically sufficient and methodologically
useful need to be identified. To this end, this report reviews several
earlier approaches and introduces a remodelled informational description
of the sentence that draws from and improves on these approaches and
shows how these informational distinctions are structurally manifested
in several languages, with an emphasis on Catalan, Dutch, and
English. It also contains a discussion of the structural effects of
other pragmatic domains (referential status, presupposition) and their
interaction with information packaging, and of some related issues
concerning the use of intonation.
(August 1993; 43 pages)
Ref. No: HCRC/RP-44 Price: UKL 1.60
J. A. Taylor:
An ATMS-based Belief Model for Dialogue Simultation
This paper describes a belief model that has been developed for use in
a computational model of dialogue. The model combines a basis in
logic with restrictions on the propositions and reasoning steps that
can be supported, resulting in a system that supports the type of
reasoning that people seem to carry out subconsciously during simple,
task-oriented dialogues.
The notion of vivid acquaintance with concepts is explained as a
shorthand for propositional information. The effects of utterances on
agents' degrees of acquaintance and beliefs about one another are
described, and a simulated dialogue from the Map Task is presented.
(October 1993; 20 pages)
Ref. No: HCRC/RP-45 Price: UKL 1.10
Jonathan Ginzburg:
Resolving Questions
Interrogative sentences have two prominent uses: they can serve to name
{\em questions}, the descriptive contents of queries (`So tell me: who
left yesterday?'), but also to describe, roughly, the true and complete
{\em answer} to a query use (`She told me who left yesterday.'). The
paper develops a theory of questions, formulated within a situation
theoretic setting, that attempts to explain the source of this duality
without appealing to an ambiguity, as most past accounts have. The key
notion developed is that of a question's being {\bf resolved} or {\bf
unresolved}.
Resolvedness turns out to have a wide range of applications: for
instance, it provides a means for defining an evaluation criterion for
the optimality of a response to a query; resolvedness provides a
suitably context sensitive notion of `exhaustiveness', the proper
characterisation of which has been a long standing issue in the
semantics of interrogatives: for instance, what information an agent
will describe as constituting `being aware where I am' will vary
depending on whether the agent is getting off an airplane (`I am in
Helsinki' will do fine.) or getting out of a taxi (`I am in Helsinki'
will definitely not do.); It is shown here that various interrogative
embedding predicates (`resolutive predicates' e.g. know,tell,discover)
carry the presupposition that their complement is a {\em resolved}
question and shown the existence of strong parallels with {\em
factivity}, where predicates carry the presupposition that their
declarative complement is a {\em true} proposition.
(October 1993; 57 pages)
Ref. No. HCRC/RP-46 Price: UKL 1.90