Representing Discourse in Context

This article gives a survey of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), including recent developments, and with an emphasis on logical issues. Discourse representation structures are defined, and various prespectives on their static and dynamic meaning are discussed. This discussion leads to the study of the process of merging representation structures, a process which can be viewed as a strategy for memory management. Next, a toy example fragment of English is presented, with a compositional DRT semantics. The final sections are devoted to the treatment of quantification and of tense and aspect.

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