Section: New Results

Modelling Semantic Phenomena

Despite the valuable insights yielded by the classical theories of discourse semantics, there is a wide range of exceptional phenomena that they fail to address, e.g., anaphora under double negation and modality. Concentrating on these two exceptions, Sai Qian, Philippe de Groote and Maxime Amblard provide a corresponding adaptation of TTDL for each case. Briefly speaking, for the problem of double negation, they propose to encapsulate both the affirmative representation and the negative representation of an expression in its semantics. Negation is treated as an operation which switches the positions of the two representations. Thus a second negation will switch the positions again as if no negation had ever occurred. In this way, a double negation can be eliminated and the desired referent accessibility is modelled. As for anaphora under modality, they propose to enrich the TTDL left context with the notion of modal base, which is proposed by Kratzer. The possible world model is integrated in the semantic representation as well. Moreover, they show how the different adaptations could work in an unified framework,   [75] .