Discourse Representation Theory - Discourse Representation Structures

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.