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Semantic and Pragmatic Presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory

Paper · 2006 · Yafa Al-Raheb

Summary

The paper argues that Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), with dynamic-semantics accounts such as van der Sandt (1992), treats presupposition mostly as a property of sentences and of hearer accommodation. It therefore misses how presupposition depends on what dialogue agents believe. Al-Raheb proposes treating presupposition as a property of agents and separates three notions: speaker presupposition, sentence presupposition and hearer presupposition. The speaker's beliefs, including beliefs about the hearer's beliefs, shape the presupposition carried by the utterance. That utterance then gives rise to the hearer's presupposition.

The link between the three is modelled as three "information checks" that both parties run: clarification, informativity and consistency. The speaker runs them while generating an utterance and the hearer runs them while recognising it. The checks are tied to Gricean maxims and to Geurts' distinction between remarkable and unremarkable presuppositions. The contribution is conceptual rather than empirical, and it is illustrated with constructed dialogues. Its value is a more balanced, belief-based account that connects semantic and pragmatic presupposition inside DRT.

Key points

  • Three kinds of presupposition are distinguished:
    • speaker presupposition, grounded in the speaker's beliefs and intentions;
    • sentence presupposition, grounded in sentence meaning;
    • hearer presupposition, the result of recognition.
  • Three information checks are proposed (Figures 2–5 trace them separately for speaker and hearer):
    • the clarification check corresponds to the maxim of manner and can recur at several stages;
    • the informativity check, a reworked quality maxim, asks whether information is new or old to each agent;
    • the consistency check corresponds to relevance.
  • Under Grice's Cooperative Principle, the paper takes a stronger stance than Geurts. A presupposition reflects an actual speaker belief, not mere commitment.
  • Belief has two grades, acceptance (weak belief) and full belief. States are written in nested form, e.g. bel(S,accept(H,P)), bel(S,clear(H,P)) and bel(H,bel(S,bel(H,P))).
  • Example dialogues illustrate the cases:
    • "Your what?" for an unclear presupposition;
    • "Julia is widowed!" for an inconsistent one;
    • the pet lion for a remarkable one.
    • Absent negative feedback, the speaker assumes the hearer accepts P.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper separates presupposition into speaker, sentence and hearer views, so the same content can be tracked as intended, encoded and received states rather than one flat fact.
  • I2. Belief is graded into acceptance versus full belief, so new information is first held weakly and promoted to belief later.
  • I3. Presupposed content is passed through a fixed order of checks (clear, informative, consistent, then remarkable), and each failure point maps to a distinct dialogue reaction such as a clarification request, rejection or repair.
  • I4. Silence counts as default acceptance: without negative feedback, the other agent is assumed to accept P, which offers a simple, explicit default rule for updating mutual belief.
  • I5. Unremarkable presuppositions are accommodated quietly, while remarkable ones (a small jet parked in the city, a pet lion) trigger scrutiny, so plausibility against ordinary expectations is part of interpretation.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): crate prag could tag each presupposition trigger with who holds it, keeping the sentence-level trigger separate from what the narrator or a character believes.
  • I2 (world): the world of the text could keep an "accepted" tier for claims a character has heard, promoting them to held beliefs only when the text confirms them, which keeps the reasoning explainable.
  • I3 (frames): this ordered check pipeline could drive speech-act detection in dialogue, labelling responses like "Your what?" or "That can't be!" by which check failed.
  • I4 (answer): fable and tale QA could use this default to answer "does X know Y?" questions, and cite the absence of objection as the justification.
  • I5 (world): WordNet/Wikidata-based ontology priors could flag presupposed entities that are unusual for the setting, marking them for extra checking instead of silently adding them.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 138 works

Cite

Cite as Yafa Al-Raheb. 2006. Semantic and Pragmatic Presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory. Proceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{alraheb2006semantic,
  title = {{Semantic and Pragmatic Presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory}},
  author = {Yafa Al-Raheb},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue},
  year = {2006},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W06-1310/}
}

References

23 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Al-Raheb, Y. 2005. Speaker/Hearer Representation in a Discourse Representation Theory Model of Presupposition: A Computational-Linguistic Approach. Phd. University of East Anglia. find
  2. Asher, N. and Lascarides, A. 1998b. ‘The Semantics and Pragmatics of Presupposition’. Journal of Semantics 15, pp. 239–299. ↗
  3. Geurts, B. 1996. ‘Local Satisfaction Guaranteed: A Presupposition Theory and Its Problems’. Linguistics and Philosophy 19, pp. 259–294. ↗
  4. Geurts, B. 1998. ‘Presupposition and Anaphors in Attitude Contexts’. Linguistics and Philosophy 21, pp. 545–601. find
  5. Geurts, B. 1999. Presuppositions and Pronouns: Current Research in the Semantics/ Pragmatics Interface. Oxford: Elsevier. find
  6. Grice, P. 1975. ‘Logic and Conversation (from the William James Lectures, Harvard University, 1967)’. In: P. Cole and J. Morgan (Eds.). Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. pp. 41-58. New York: Academic Press. find
  7. Grice, P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. find
  8. Kamp, H. 1984. ‘A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation’. In: J. Groenendijk, T. Janseen, and M. Stokhof (Eds.). Truth, Interpretation and Information: Selected Papers from the Third Amsterdam Colloquium. Amsterdam: Foris Publications. find
  9. Kamp, H. 1988. ‘Comments on Stalnaker’. In: R. Grimm and D. Merrill (Eds.). Contents of Thought. Proceedings of the 1985 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. pp. 156–181. Tucson State: The University of Arizona Press. find
  10. Kamp, H. 1990. ‘Prolegomena to a Structural Account of Belief and Other Attitudes’. In: C. Anderson and J. Owens (Eds.). Propositional Attitudes: The Role of Content in Logic, Language, and Mind. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. find
  11. Kamp, H. 1995. ‘Discourse Representation Theory’. In: J. Verschueren, J. Ostman, and J. Bloomaert (Eds.). Handbook of Pragmatics Manual. Amsterdam: John Benjamin. ↗
  12. Kamp, H. 2001a. ‘Computation and Justification of Presuppositions: One Aspect of the Interpretation of Multi-Sentence Discourse’. In: M. Bras and L. Vieu (Eds.). Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse and Dialogue: Experimenting with Current Theories. pp. 57–84. Oxford: Elsevier Science. find
  13. Kamp, H. 2001b. ‘The Importance of Presupposition’. In: C. Rohrer and A. Rossdeutscher (Eds.). Linguistic Form and its Computation: Selected Papers from the SFB 340. pp. 207-254. Stanford: CSLI. find
  14. Kamp, H. and Reyle, U. 1993. From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Model Theoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory. Boston, Dordrecht: Kluwer. find
  15. Kamp, H., van Genabith, J., and Reyle, U. 2005. The Handbook of Logic. Unpublished Manuscript. http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/˜hans/. ↗
  16. Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  17. Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  18. Purver, M., Healey, P., King, J., Ginzburg, J., and Mills, G. 2003. ‘Answering Clarification Questions’. In: Proceedings of the 4th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 23–33. Sapporo.
  19. Purver, M. 2004. ‘Claire: the Clarification Engine’. In: J. Ginzburg and E. Vallduvi (Eds.). Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. Catalog ‘04. pp. 77-84. Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Barcelona. find
  20. Schegloff, E., Jefferson, G., and Sacks, H. 1977. ‘The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation’. Language 53, pp. 361– 382. ↗
  21. Stalnaker, R. 2002. ‘Common ground’. Linguistics and Philosophy 25(5-6), pp. 701–721. find
  22. van der Sandt, R. and Geurts, B. 1991. ‘Presupposition, Anaphora, and Lexical Content’. In: O. Herzog and C.-R. Rollinger (Eds.). Text Understanding in LILOG. pp. 259–296. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. find
  23. van der Sandt, R. 1992. ‘Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution’. Journal of Semantics 9, pp. 333–377. ↗

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