Coordination of unmatched clause types and dynamic look-ahead

What it is about

Declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamative clauses can be joined by and and or in English ("John left town, and after all, why wouldn't he?"; "Wash the dishes, or take out the trash!"), and any of the four can be the consequent of a conditional. Static semantics cannot combine clauses of different logical types, so the paper gives a dynamic semantics. A context is a tuple of a common ground (CG), questions under discussion (QUD), to-do lists (TDL) and affective trigger registries (ATR). Each clause type updates one of these. Conjunction is function composition. Disjunction is set union over sets of developments, a set of sequences of contexts, so that a disjunction can leave the discourse "in limbo" until one branch is confirmed. Subordinate clauses are made static by an operator that returns the proposition, question or property the dynamic meaning implies. The evidence is constructed and attested examples; there is no corpus study.

Ideas

• I1. Typed context update in prag/src/infer.rs: a context holds four BTreeSets (CG, QUD, TDL per addressee, ATR per speaker), and the clause type decides which set a clause writes to: declarative to CG, interrogative to QUD, imperative to TDL, exclamative to ATR. Check on the dialogue lessons that "Wash the dishes, and I will dry" leaves the dish task on the addressee's list and the drying claim in CG.
• I2. Limbo as a finite set of alternative contexts: for "A or B", keep both branches in a BTreeMap keyed by branch id, and remove a branch when its content is contradicted or confirmed. This is a small deterministic version of the paper's sets of developments, and it can answer "is that still open?" questions.
• I3. Subordinate clauses as static content: when a clause sits under an attitude verb (believe, know, wonder), take its static value and do not update the speaker's CG. Put this in prag/src/frames.rs, with a negative control in which the embedded clause is treated as main, which must change the answers to the belief questions.
• I4. Order test: for pairs of clauses with no anaphora, reversing the order should give the same final registries. Use this as a property test over the school dialogues; failures point to anaphora or presupposition that the reader must track.
• I5. Conditional consequents of any type: parse "If p, q" with q as imperative or question, and store the update as a conditional entry in the context, not as a fact. Count how many dialogue lessons contain conditional imperatives or questions, and measure whether the answer to a follow-up question is right.

For Mova

Clause types and speech acts: 31. Speech acts, 26. Questions (interrogatives), 21. The simple clause (clause type). Coordination and conditionals: 24. Coordination and subordination, 36. Discourse relations and coherence. Dialogue state: 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech. Code: prag/src/infer.rs and prag/src/frames.rs (the context update and the static embedding), world/src/qud.rs (questions under discussion), world/src/story.rs (common ground). Measure: accuracy of the registries after each school dialogue, the order-reversal property test, run twice for determinism.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.19.11

@article{lasersohn2026coordination,
  title = {{Coordination of unmatched clause types and dynamic look-ahead}},
  author = {Lasersohn, Peter},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.19.11},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.19.11}
}

References

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