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Information Structure: Afterword

Paper · 2012 · Craige Roberts

Summary

This afterword accompanies the belated formal publication of Roberts' influential 1996/1998 manuscript on Information Structure. It explains where the "question under discussion" (QUD) framework came from and how the author's views developed afterwards. The problem it addresses is that classical pragmatics was a loose collection of unrelated topics, and its accounts could not be falsified. The paper argues that an integrated theory needs two things: an explicit model of the context of utterance, and compatibility with compositional formal semantics. The proposal is to ground discourse structure in questions understood as semantic objects (sets of alternatives), not as interrogative sentences or speech acts. The essay also introduces a principle called Retrievability, derived from Grice's account of meaning as intention recognition. An appendix gives a formal discourse scoreboard that adds interlocutors and their goals to the earlier model. The work matters because it gives pragmatic explanations testable predictions, and because it frames context-dependent lexical meaning as the current frontier of semantics.

Key points

  • The framework draws on several traditions:
    • dynamic semantics (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982);
    • Rooth's alternative semantics for focus;
    • AI and computational work on plans and intentions (Cohen & Perrault, Grosz & Sidner, Bratman, Thomason);
    • Carlson's question-based language games.
  • Questions are modelled as Hamblin or Groenendijk & Stokhof semantic objects.
  • Retrievability: a cooperative speaker must reasonably expect the addressee to recover the intended meaning. The author claims several consequences follow from it:
    • the uniqueness implication of definites, without building it into the conventional meaning;
    • a ban on felicitous ambiguity;
    • vagueness remains acceptable, as long as the hearer only needs to retrieve a vague meaning.
  • Appendix B scoreboard contains:
    • interlocutors I;
    • goal sets G_i and common goals G_com;
    • question-answering goals G_Q;
    • moves M, split into assertions, questions, suggestions and accepted moves, with a total utterance order;
    • the common ground CG;
    • discourse referents DR;
    • an ordered QUD.
  • Constraints on the QUD:
    • each QUD must serve a shared goal;
    • no QUD may already be answered by CG.
  • Goals are divided into Discourse Goals (G_Q) and Domain Goals (G_i minus G_Q).
  • Appendix A links to an online map and bibliography of QUD-related research.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The framework treats every implicit part of meaning (ellipsis, anaphora, domain restriction, implicature) as resolved against the current question, so one mechanism replaces many ad hoc rules.
  • I2. Retrievability serves as a design test: if a reading could not be recovered by a reasonable hearer, it is not the intended one, which yields uniqueness for definites and rules out deliberate ambiguity.
  • I3. The scoreboard is an explicit typed tuple: interlocutors, goals, ordered moves with their acceptance status, common ground, discourse referents and QUD. This makes the state of a discourse inspectable at every point.
  • I4. The split between discourse goals (answering open questions) and domain goals (characters' practical aims) separates conversational structure from the plot.
  • I5. An open question is defined as one whose answer the common ground does not yet entail, which gives a crisp criterion for completion.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): prag could keep an explicit QUD stack and use it to resolve elliptical answers, restrict quantifier domains and compute relevance implicatures, logging which question licensed each choice.
  • I2 (frames): coreference could prefer the unique, most salient discourse referent and flag cases where no unique antecedent is retrievable, rather than silently guessing.
  • I3 (world): the world-of-text state could adopt this tuple, separating accepted assertions (CG) from merely proposed ones and ordering all moves, so answers can cite the state that justified them.
  • I4 (answer): fable QA could model characters' domain goals apart from the dialogue's open questions, which helps explain motives and detect when a question has been settled.
  • I5 (answer): a reader could check whether its world model entails an answer before responding, and report "not settled by the text" otherwise, which also serves as a negative control.

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

 Institutions

🎓The Ohio State UniversityColumbus · United States57 works · 17,793 citations

📚 Shelves 3 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Philosophy · 211 works

Cite

Cite as Craige Roberts. 2012. Information Structure: Afterword. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.5.7

@article{roberts2012information,
  title = {{Information Structure: Afterword}},
  author = {Craige Roberts},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.5.7},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.7}
}

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