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
Famous quotes containing the words discourse and/or structures:
“Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)