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Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics

What it is about

The classic statement of the Question Under Discussion model. Discourse is a game whose goal is to answer «what is the way things are?»; interlocutors pursue it through strategies of sub-inquiry. A question denotes its q-alternatives (the proposition with the wh-word varied; a yes/no question {p}); a partial answer settles some alternative, a complete answer settles all. Accepted questions go on a QUD stack; a question can be added only if answering it contextually entails a partial answer to the one below (a subquestion in a strategy), and it is popped when answered or found practically unanswerable. Relevance: every move must partially answer the current QUD or belong to a strategy for it. Prosodic focus presupposes the QUD (question–answer congruence: the answer's focal alternatives equal the question's q-alternatives). The second half applies this to focus phenomena: the domain of only (and other focus-sensitive operators) is the set of alternatives of the current QUD, not merely what prosodic focus marks; contrastive topics signal a strategy of subquestions.

Ideas

For Mova

languages/en/36-discourse-relations.md §9 and §11.5 (QUD stack), 29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure.md (focus, contrastive topic), 33-implicature-and-presupposition.md (only). Code: world/src/qud.rs, prag/src/infer.rs, world/src/knowledge.rs. Measures: minimal-pair QUD tests; course questions with only; share of guesses on open questions.

Library summary

The Research library's own summary of the paper, in our words — not the paper's text.

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/download/sp.5.6/pdf

Summary

Roberts argues that information structure should not be treated as a property of individual sentences, such as theme/rheme or topic/focus splits. Instead, it should be seen as the organization of the inquiry that interlocutors pursue together. The paper is purely theoretical, with no corpus, dataset or experiments. It builds a formal pragmatic framework in which conversation works like a game. The context acts as a scoreboard that records shared information and a structured stack of accepted questions, the questions under discussion (QUD). Questions are modeled as sets of alternative propositions, or partitions of the context set. Answers and sub-questions must address the current QUD to count as Relevant. The author then applies this model to English prosodic focus. She claims that focus conventionally presupposes the question an utterance addresses, which constrains where that utterance can felicitously appear. The work matters because it offers one explicit, testable foundation for many pragmatic phenomena that are usually handled separately. It later became the standard reference for QUD-based analyses in semantics and pragmatics.

Key points

  • Published in Semantics and Pragmatics 5, Article 6 (2012, 69 pp.). It reissues a 1996 OSU working paper, amended in 1998, with its content essentially unchanged.
  • It extends Stalnaker's (1978) common ground and context set. The overall aim of discourse is framed as narrowing the context set to the actual world, which the author calls answering the "Big Question."
  • It adopts Carlson's (1982) game view of discourse. Questions are setup moves and assertions are payoff moves. Moves are semantic objects, not speech acts, and each has presupposed and proffered content.
  • Relevance is formally defined: an assertion, question or suggestion is Relevant exactly when it addresses the QUD. Strategies of inquiry are built as hierarchies of sub-questions.
  • The paper sketches further applications: topicalization (Ward's 1985 partially ordered sets), scalar implicature, and rhetorical relations (Mann & Thompson 1987), all as part of a unified formal pragmatics.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.5.6

@article{roberts2012information,
  title = {{Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics}},
  author = {Roberts, Craige},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.5.6},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6}
}

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