Page 218 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
/i-tuple of entities) about which new information is provided in the sentence. A discourse topic, on the other hand, is defined in terms of the entailments of the set of propositions expressed by the discourse (segment).
A uniform conception of sentence topics and dis- course topics is assumed in certain other (formal)vari- ants of discourse grammar (e.g., Polanyi and Scha 1984), in Asher's (1993) theory, which accounts for discourse structure in Discourse Representation The- ory (Kamp 1981), as well as in theories of discourse central to which is the structuring function of (implicit) higher- and lower-order topic-forming ques- tions (e.g., Carlson 1985; Klein and Von Stutterheim 1987; Van Kuppevelt 1991). In all these theories only one topic notion is assumed which covers both the notion of sentence topic and that of topic of larger discourse units. Contrary to the discourse theories in terms of questions, the first two approaches do not give a uniform topical account of discourse structure, as would appear from their assumption that not all discourse relations are topic-based. In Carlson's (1985) and Klein and Von Stutterheim's (1987) ques- tion theories, for example, hierarchical discourse structure is uniformly determined by topic-forming
questions. However, the assigned structures are restricted because only subquestions of the quan- titative type are presupposed: common topics defined by higher-order questions are modularly split up into more specific (entailed) subtopics defined by quan- titative subquestions. The theory of Van Kuppevelt (1991 and other publications), on the other hand, pro- vides a uniform, unrestricted topic notion. This notion is central in the explanation of hierarchical discourse structure in general, which is considered to be the result of the dynamics of contextually inducedexplicit and implicit (sub)topic-forming (sub)questions, thereby also providing a semantic, topical basis for pragmatic inferences known as Gricean con- versational implicatures (Grice 1989). Besides the above-mentioned approaches, new dynamic approaches in terms of topics and questions have recently been proposed within formal semantics (e.g., Ginzburg 1996; Groenendijk and Stokhof 1993; Gro- enendijk, et al 1996; Roberts 1996; Zeevat 1994).
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