21.5218, Diss: Disc Analysis: Irmer: 'Bridging Inferences in Discourse ...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-5218. Wed Dec 22 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.5218, Diss: Disc Analysis: Irmer: 'Bridging Inferences in Discourse ...'

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1)
Date: 20-Dec-2010
From: Matthias Irmer [mirmer at uni-leipzig.de]
Subject: Bridging Inferences in Discourse Interpretation
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:17:27
From: Matthias Irmer [mirmer at uni-leipzig.de]
Subject: Bridging Inferences in Discourse Interpretation

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Institution: Universität Leipzig 
Program: Faculty of Language Studies 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2010 

Author: Matthias Irmer

Dissertation Title: Bridging Inferences in Discourse Interpretation 

Dissertation URL:  http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~irmer/publications.html

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis


Dissertation Director(s):
Johannes Doelling
Nicholas Asher
Anita Steube

Dissertation Abstract:

The subject of this thesis is the role bridging inferences play in discourse
interpretation. Bridging inferences, i.e. the resolution of indirect anaphoric
relationships between entities in a text or a discourse, must be drawn by
recipients in order to make sense of the linguistic input which often does not
fully specify the intended meaning of utterances. Contextual knowledge has to be
taken into account for successfully determining the meaning of texts and
discourses. This thesis examines the interpretation of discourses in general,
and bridging inferences in particular, from formal, computational, cognitive,
and psychological points of view. It develops a formalization which can account
for underspecification in cohesion and coherence of discourses and permits the
integration of bridging inferences in the construction of a structured discourse
representation. 

The first part of the dissertation reviews the numerous existing approaches,
which have been elaborated in a wide range of research contexts, to key issues
in discourse semantics and pragmatics. Central topics are pragmatic inferences
and defeasible reasoning in general, the Common Ground and intentions of
discourse participants, cohesion and anaphora resolution, coherence and
discourse structure, and discourse interpretation. The second part of the thesis
takes a closer look at bridging inferences and starts from a new classification
of bridging anaphora, based on existing corpus-based and psycholinguistic
studies, which distinguishes two types of bridging relations: mereological and
frame-related bridging. Mereological bridging is characterized by a part-of
relation between anaphor and anchor, while frame-related bridging involves
thematic and conceptual relationships. Special attention is given to bridging
anaphora involving eventualities and their modeling by means of integrating
encyclopedic knowledge encoded in FrameNet, a cognitive network of stereotypical
scenarios or frames, into a formal theory of discourse structure as provided by
Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). The present approach spells
out how world knowledge, represented in frames, contributes to discourse
interpretation, both for establishing discourse relations and for resolving
bridging anaphora.  A second focus lies on the discourse integration of a
specific construction, Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in Spanish, a device used
to link an utterance to the preceding discourse in a particular way, often
involving bridging inferences.





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