The rhetorical attachment of questions and answers

Placing ourselves within the tradition of dynamic semantic approaches to discourse in natural language Kamp and Reyle (1993), Groenendjik and Stokhof (1991), we investigate here how some of the principles underlying these approaches can be extended to the study of human dialogue, taking over some hypotheses of Asher and Lascarides (1998, 2003). In this perspective, a dialogue is made of segments just like any discourse; the semantics of each one of these segments is represented in a logical framework and linked to other segments by so-called rhetorical relations Hobbs (1985) that also carry semantic or intentional content, in the spirit of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory Asher (1993). Thus can be integrated linguistic phenomena tackled by formal semantics and more dialogue-specific characteristics such as turn-taking conventions or common ground establishment. We will focus here on the issue of question/answer pairs and on the way they structure some of the established conversational content. More specifically, we have focused on Yes/No questions (questions for which the expected answer can be Yes or No, possibly with some additional material). In order to do so, we have collected a corpus of dialogues from phone conversations in a specific, constructed setting. This corpus is made of 21 transcribed 21 conversations. Phone conversations eliminate deictics and gestures as well as facial expressions in order to focus on verbal communication. Each dialogue involves a “giver” and a “receiver”: