Questions in update semantics

Authors
Publication date 1998
Host editors
  • J.H. Hulstijn
  • A. Nijholt
Book title Formal semantics and pragmatics of dialogue: proceedings of the thirteenth Twente Workshop on language technology (Twendial '98)
Pages (from-to) 125-137
Publisher Enschede: Universiteit Twente, Faculteit Informatica
Organisations
  • Faculty of Humanities (FGw)
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract
The paper presents a static and dynamic version of an update semantics for a language of predicate logic enriched with simplex interrogatives. The static version gives rise to the same logic as the denotational semantics given for the same language in Groenendijk & Stokhof (1997). The dynamic semantics has some additional features, which concern anaphoric relations, and present us with a notion of existential quantification which seems to correspond to the specific use of indefinites. At meta-logical level an absolute notion of discourse coherence is defined which covers the usual notion of answerhood as a special case. More fine-grained notions of relevance and coherence are given as well, and are applied to simple interrogative dialogues.
Document type Conference contribution
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