Logics of Conversation

Nicholas Asher is Professor of Philosophy and of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include formal semantics and pragmatics, discourse processing and various topics in philosophical logic. He has published over eighty articles and is the author of Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse (1993). Alex Lascarides is Reader in the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include theoretical and computational linguistics, particularly semantics, pragmatics and discourse processing. She has published over forty research articles.

• Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Motivations; 2. Semantic models of discourse interpretation; 3. Pragmatic models of discourse interpretation; 4. The logical form of discourse; 5. Building logical forms for discourse; 6. The lexicon and discourse structure; 7. Discourse relations for dialogue; 8. Disputes in dialogue; 9. Cognitive modelling; 10. Some concluding remarks: A. Objections and replies; B. Notation index; C. The semantics of DRT; D. Glossary of discourse relations; E. Summary of discourse update; F. Some proofs in the glue logic; References; Indexes.

'This study presents a dynamic semantic framework called Segmented Discourse Representation Theory … where the interaction between discourse coherence and discourse interpretation is explored in a logically precise manner.' Studia Logica