Talk by Livia Polanyi and Martin H. van den Berg
Discourse Structure and Discourse
Interpretation
In this paper, we show that a formal account of complex natural
language phenomena can shed light on the long existing problem of the
apparent non-linear flow of temporal information in discourse.
Building on the Linguistic Discourse Model of Polanyi and Scha (1988)
and the treatment of events in Partee (1984), a unified treatment is
given of exceptions to the \emph{strong narrative hypothesis}, which
states that the order of the event clauses in a text is isomorphic
with the order of events in the model of that text. The formal
machinery employed is that of recursive discourse grammar, combined
with some results from dynamic semantics applied to events.
Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995