Using argumentation to control lexical choice: a functional unification implementation

New surface generation techniques that improve on both aspects of surface generation are presented, which allow a purely conceptual input to be expressed by a greater variety of linguistic forms and with more sensitivity to pragmatic factors than was previously possible.

Abstract

This thesis investigates the impact of the pragmatic situation on surface generation. It presents new surface generation techniques that improve on both aspects of surface generation: (1) lexical choice, which consists of choosing words and their associated syntactic structures and (2) syntactic realization, which consists of combining these partial structures into grammatical sentences. Because surface generation depends directly on aspects of the pragmatic situation, these new techniques allow a purely conceptual input to be expressed by a greater variety of linguistic forms and with more sensitivity to pragmatic factors than was previously possible. Specifically, this research focuses on the impact on lexical choice of one part of the pragmatic situation: the speaker’s argumentative intent, i.e., the goal of the speaker to convince the hearer of a certain conclusion. The argumentative intent can be realized by a variety of evaluative expressions appearing at various ranks in the syntactic structure. This thesis describes the selection of four classes of evaluative expressions: judgment