Talk by Nicholas Asher
Mathematical Treatments of Discourse Contexts
Recent developments in dynamic semantics have shown an equivalence between representational
versions of dynamic semantics (e.g., DRT) and a more abstract and more purely model-theoretic
approach using sets of model or world-sequence pairs (WSP's). This paper shows that a similar
correspondence holds for theories that deal with the pragmatic-semantic interface and exploit
discourse structures such as those found in Hobbs (1985), Mann and Thompson (1987), Pruest
and Scha (1990), or the SDRT of Asher (1993) and Lascarides and Asher (1993). Just as the
structurally simpler notion of sets of world-sequence pairs (WSP's) captures the dynamic
properties of the DRT fragment of Kamp (1981), so too a much simpler structure consisting of
a set of such sets of WSP's together with a distinguished set of SP's can capture, e.g., the
temporal anaphoric properties of discourse structure in SDRT.
Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995