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

• I1. Give world/src/qud.rs the subquestion test from the paper instead of lemma overlap alone: a new question may be pushed on top of q only if its alternative set is a subset of q's (same predicate, one more argument fixed: «Who did the fox trick?» under «Who tricked whom?»), or if a bridging question links them. Questions that fail go to a fresh stack entry and are reported. Test with minimal pairs on hand-built dialogues (the existing tests in qud.rs are on hand-built trees).
• I2. Read only against the current QUD: «The fox only wanted the cheese» → the alternatives are the other wanted things in the QUD's domain (entities in the same role in remembered frames), and the inference «not the others» goes into prag/src/infer.rs next to the scalar implicatures, with the alternatives listed in the explanation. Measure on course questions with only (count them first).
• I3. Mark a QUD as «practically unanswerable» when the text ends or the topic shifts with the question still open, and let the school student use it: a question about a stacked but never answered QUD should get «the text does not say» rather than a guess. Count, with world knowledge diagnose, how many guesses (step 3) are about questions the text leaves open.

For Mova

36. Discourse relations and coherence §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.

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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