Section: New Results

Modelisation of discourse structures with DSTAG

Participant : Laurence Danlos.

This work was done within the ANR Polymnie, in collaboration with Sylvain Pogodalla and Philippe de Groote from LORIA.

Neg-Raising (NR) verbs form a class of verbs with a clausal complement that show the following behavior: when a negation syntactically attaches to the matrix predicate, it can semantically attach to the embedded predicate. Such an implication does not always hold. Some contexts make it impossible to consider the negation as having scope over the embedded predicate only. This corresponds to the non-NR reading of the predicate.

We have developed and published [20] an account of NR predicates within Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAG) that relies on a Montague-like semantics for TAG. The different properties of NR predicates are rendered at different levels: the ambiguity of the readings is modeled by lexical ambiguity; the scoping and cyclicity properties are modeled through the lexical semantics and the higher-order interpretation of adjunction nodes; spurious am- biguities are avoided using fine-grained types for terms representing derivation trees. This provides us with a base layer where to account for interactions with discourse connectives and discourse representation represented in DSTAG.