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Modelling suppositional meaning in discourse| title | Modelling suppositional meaning in discourse |
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| start_date | 2022/10/12 |
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| schedule | 16h-17hh UTC+2 |
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| online | yes |
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| summary | English and many other languages show a variety of “suppositional devices” that are used to create temporary discourse contexts where a certain proposition is taken for granted. Most work on this topic has dealt with a single item, “if”, and assumes that the phenomenon is basically one of sentence-level semantics. In recent work I’ve argued that such theories miss a number of important generalizations that are better captured by treating the discourse effect of suppositions as primary and their sentence-level effects as parasitic on the pragmatics of assertion and the dependency of certain operators on local context. After reviewing these arguments, I’ll turn to a rather straightforward account that this approach suggests of so-called “modal subordination”, in which a temporary assumption survives over multiple utterances. A simple, context-free version of this theory is sufficient in many cases, but certain examples show crossing dependencies that require a non-context-free treatment. This is interesting, among other things, because Kogkalidis and Wijnholds (2022) have recently shown that BERT and other large language models have difficulty learning crossing grammatical dependencies in Dutch. Similar dependencies at the discourse level may be even more difficult to acquire, since the cues that humans use to resolve them are typically not explicitly represented in written text. I suggest that learning crossing discourse dependencies will be a major practical challenge for those who seek to engineer robust natural language understanding systems using written texts as the primary data source. |
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| responsibles | Bernard |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2022/11/30 16:06 UTC |
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