A compositional approach to short answers in dialogue

Non-sentential utterances, and especially short answers, are pervasive in dialogues. Some researchers have observed that there are complex syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints on acceptable short answers. This has been used to motivate a radically unmodular architecture for their analysis, where information from grammar and from discourse isn’t distinguished. Here we suggest an alternative analysis, which separates the (underspecified) compositional semantics of fragments from their resolved meaning in context.

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