Open AccessA compositional and constraint-based approach to non-sentential utterances
Author(s) -
David Schlangen,
Ālex Lascarides
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2003.21
Subject(s) - utterance , computer science , sentence , constraint (computer aided design) , context (archaeology) , interpretation (philosophy) , natural language processing , linguistics , semantics (computer science) , resolution (logic) , artificial intelligence , semantic interpretation , programming language , mathematics , philosophy , history , geometry , archaeology
We present an approach to the interpretation of non-sententialutterances like B's utterance in the following mini-dialogue:A: ˋˋWho came to the party?''B: ˋˋPeter.´´Such utterances pose several puzzles: they conveyˋsentence-type' messages (propositions, questions or request)while being of non-sentential form; and they are constrainedboth semantically and syntactically by the context. We addressthese puzzles in our approach which is compositional, since weprovide a formal semantics for such fragments independent oftheir context, and constraint-based because resolution isbased on collecting contextual constraints.