Discourse Representation Structures
DRT uses discourse representation structures (DRS) to represent a hearer's mental representation of a discourse as it unfolds over time. There are two critical components to a DRS:
- A set of discourse referents representing entities which are under discussion.
- A set of DRS conditions representing information that has been given about discourse referents.
Consider Sentence (1) below:
- (1) A farmer owns a donkey.
The DRS of (1) can be notated as (2) below:
- (2)
What (2) says is that there are two discourse referents, x and y, and three discourse conditions farmer, donkey, and owns, such that the condition farmer holds of x, donkey holds of y, and owns holds of the pair x and y.
Informally, the DRS in (2) is true in a given model of evaluation if and only if there are entities in that model which satisfy the conditions. So, if a model contains two individuals, and one is a farmer, the other is a donkey, and the first owns the second, the DRS in (2) is true in that model.
Uttering subsequent sentences result in the existing DRS being updated.
- (3) He beats it.
Uttering (3) after (1) results in the DRS in (2) being updated as follows, in (4) (assuming a way to disambiguate which pronoun refers to which individual).
- (4)
Successive utterances of sentences work in a similar way, although the process is somewhat more complicated for more complex sentences such as sentences containing negation, and conditionals.
Read more about this topic: Discourse Representation Theory
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