Contenu du sommaire : Sémantique du discours, sous la direction de Francis Corblin

The paper advocates a move from the traditional logical-philosophical concept of meaning as a pictorial relation between language and the world, towards a dynamic view which ties the notion of meaning directly to the process of interpretation of discourse. Dynamics is shown at work in an analysis of certain anaphoric relations in terms of contextually restricted quantification. It is argued that accounting for these anaphoric relations calls for an analysis at the level of semantic content rather than by linkink formal elements in a representational framework.

The present paper extends dynamic semantics to take account of discourse structure and its semantic effects on discourse interpretation. It offers an introductory overview to the theory known as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory or SDRT, which has been applied to several domains : pronominal and temporal anaphora, lexical disambiguation, and spatial inferences in text.

In this paper, it is argued that there is no need to assume that plural pronouns can refer to the complement (А П -i B) of a set introduced by a quantified sentence of form Q A B. It is argued instead that apparent references to this set are in fact references to the A set. A way of dealing with the accessibility of the set A is provided, and the preference of some quantifiers (e.g.yew, less than, etc.) for a reference to the A set is assumed to be trigerred by a smallness implicature carried by those quantifiers.

This paper argues that Higher-Order Unification (HOU) is preferable to overwriting techniques for dealing with parallel anaphors i.e. non-nominal anaphors whose resolution is constrained by parallelism. Computationally, we show that overwriting techniques have undesirable properties which make their use incompatible with unification-based grammars. Linguistically, we show that HOU permits a high level of linguistic adequacy in that it achieves a reasonably wide empirical covering (e.g. VP ellipsis, focus, Second Occurrence Expressions) while minimising both under- and over- generation. The HOU approach we propose is systematically compared with comparable existing theories.

The paper discusses the laws by which the counterpart relation between objects in the world and the « objects » in the mind of a person (or between the « objects » in the mind of a person A and those in the mind of a person B) evolve under the influence of communication and perception. The results of this investigation are combined with a recent theory of presuppositions to obtain an alternative solution to Frege's problem in attitudinal contexts.