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The ESPRIT Project
DANDELION
Table of Contents
DANDELION (ESPRIT Basic Research Project 6665) started in October
1992 and held its final workshop in December 1995. Partner sites were
the Tilburg/Nijmegen Center for Language Studies CLS (coordinating site) in the Netherlands; GMD-IPSI in Darmstadt, Germany; Universidad Complutense de Madrid
, Spain; University of
Edinburgh, United Kingdom; and Universität Saarbrücken,
Germany.
The objective of the project was to develop an empirically and
psychologically motivated theory of discourse, focussing mainly on
linguistic expressions
and constructions whose interpretations are propositionally equivalent,
but pragmatically different. Linguistic analysis and
psycholinguistic experimentation were employed to define mappings of
pragmatic discourse functions onto linguistic expressions and
constructions in English, Dutch, and German. These mappings are
many-to-many, since natural languages tend to have various ways of
realizing any particular discourse function, and linguistic phenomena
usually fulfil more than one such function. Moreover,
it is crucial to consider the precise
discourse context in order to constrain the function-form mapping.
The selection of discourse phenomena investigated in this way was
a compromise between broad coverage and manageability. Four general
areas were covered:
- Discourse Structure.
Discourse structure was investigated from the perspective of
genre-specific global structures and their interaction with local
coherence, and with respect to the semantic and pragmatic
contributions of causal and contrastive connectives.
- Staging.
The notions of thematic progression, focus, and information structure
were studied theoretically and empirically in order to determine
the conditioning factors guiding the interaction of these phenomena
in discourse.
- Temporal Structure.
Existing semantic approaches to temporal phenomena were enriched
with specifications of discourse functions of tense, aspect, and
temporal connectives.
- Nominal Anaphora.
The choices in nominal anaphora (pronominalisation, definiteness,
proximal/distal demonstratives) were studied with respect to
thematic progression, discourse coherence, and perspective.
The empirical study of these phenomena concentrated mainly on newspaper reports,
editorials, and narratives, which varied along several contextual
dimensions. Their variation was reflected in the global
and local organisation of the texts as well as in the use of linguistic
expressions and constructions. This patterning of discourse functions,
discourse structures, and lexico-grammatical phenomena yielded hypotheses
about form-function mappings and their interactions.
The mappings were expressed
in the form of declarative executable specifications in a
typed-feature unification formalism, and were tested in a
text-generation environment.
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Last update: January 23, 1996.
Klaas Jan Rondhuis