The context-dependence of questions and answers
The appropriateness and content of
questions and answers depends on context. In this paper a Context Change
Theory is formulated in which contexts contain enough information about
the discourse to determine what is expressed by questions and answers,
and enough information about what is presupposed about the subject
matter of conversation to determine their appropriateness. It is
proposed that mention-all and mention-some questions
introduce not only partitions to the context, but also that they
make the context-dependent abstracts that underlies these
partitions anaphorically accessible. The latter information about the
discourse is needed to determine what is expressed by an answer. These
abstracts are also used to determine the (default) exhaustive
interpretation of focussed constituents, and the (default)
non-exhaustive interpretation of topical constituents.
Robert van Rooy