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5 - On the Role of Relations and Structure In Discourse Interpretation

from Part III - Narrating and Structuring

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

By
Julie Hunter  and
Kate Thompson
Edited by
Daniel Altshuler
Daniel Altshuler
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter focuses on the role that discourse relations and structure play in a variety of phenomena of interest to semanticists and philosophers. Not only do discourse relations add semantic content above and beyond the individual propositions expressed by the utterances in a discourse, but they, and the complex structures to which they give rise, can influence the interpretations of individual utterances, having an effect on the very propositions the utterances are understood to express. In this chapter, we look in detail at how theories of discourse structure can be brought to bear on at-issue and non-at-issue content, using appositive relative clauses and discourse parenthetical reports as illustrations. We also discuss recent efforts to use discourse structure to model conversational goals and capture the subjective nature of discourse interpretation as well as recent work extending theories of discourse structure to multimodal discourse. Along the way, we emphasize the importance of corpus work in studying discursive phenomena and raise a series of large questions to be pursued in future work.

Keywords

discourse relationsdiscourse structureat-issue contentconversational goalsmultimodal discourse
Type
Chapter
Information
Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 139 - 175
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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