On the role of the hierarchy of activation in the process of natural language understanding

Hajičová, Eva; Vrbová, Jarka

doi:10.3115/991813.991830

Cited by 46 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…of how the referent is identified, has been the object of a longer discussion, see esp. Hajičová et al (1982;, the results of which might serve to enrich the theories of discourse structure formulated by H. Kamp and others. Especially the following two points are relevant:…”

Section: Topic-focus Articulation and Degrees Of Salience In The Pragmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…As was discussed since the beginning of the 1980s (see Hajičová et al 1982Hajičová et al , 1998, certain basic rules determining the degrees of (reduction of) salience can be assumed. In a schematic way, with n(r) indicating that the referent r has the salience of degree n (a natural number), we in fact measure the reduction of salience: 1 (i) if r is expressed by a noun (group) or pronoun carrying f, then n(r) => 0(r);…”

Section: Topic-focus Articulation and Degrees Of Salience In The Pragmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Topic-Focus articulation and degrees of salience in the Prague Dependency Treebank

Sgall¹,

Hajičová²,

Buráňová³

2003

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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Since Eloise Jelinek has been interested in the issues of negation, focus and information structure, to the research of which she has contributed substantially, we want to use this nice occasion and present here partial results of an analysis of the Topic-Focus articulation (TFA) of Czech and of the impact of these results on inquiries into coreferrence in coherent discourse.In Czech linguistics, TFA has been systematically explored thanks to the classical Prague School of functional and structural linguistics. As reflecting the 'given -new' strategy in discourse, TFA has been considered to belong to the main objects of linguistic study. Continuing the results gained by V. Mathesius, J. Firbas and others since the 1920s, the explicit linguistic descriptive framework characterized in Sgall et al. (1986), Hajičová (1993), Hajičová E., Partee B. and P. Sgall (1998) includes a possibility to describe TFA not only as concerning the intrinsic dynamics of the process of communication, patterned in the utterance (sentence occurrence), but also as constituting the structure of the sentence itself, i.e. grammar. Within this framework, TFA is understood as one of the basic aspects of (underlying) sentence structure, which characterizes the sentence as a unit of the interactive system of language; TFA thus is seen as a manifestation of the sentence being anchored in the context.To put it quite briefly, we may characterize the Praguian framework as based on the relation of syntactic dependency; the framework does not work with the concept of 'constituent'. This makes it easier to account for the fact that, as our examples below document, most different combinations of sentence parts may belong either to Topic or to Focus. In the underlying representations of sentences, which prorotypically are dependency trees, the left-to-right order of nodes, i.e. the underlying word order (the scale of 'communicative dynamism') starts with Topic proper and proceeds to Focus proper (the most dynamic part of the sentence). The interplay of word order and of specific features of sentence prosody corresponds to the underlying word order as its expression means.TFA is semantically relevant, as the following examples show:(1)(a) I work on my dissertation on Sundays.(b) On Sundays, I work on my dissertation.(2)(a) We went by car to a lake. (b) We went to a lake by car.(3)(a) They moved from Chicago to Boston. (b) They moved to Boston from Chicago.The semantic basis of TFA may be seen in the relation of aboutness: a prototypical declarative sentence asserts that its Focus holds about its Topic. The Topic primarily consists of 'contextually bound' items (referring to what presystemically is called "given information", and

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Section: Topic-focus Articulation and Degrees Of Salience In The Pragmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Topic-focus Articulation and Degrees Of Salience In The Pragmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic-Focus articulation and degrees of salience in the Prague Dependency Treebank

Sgall¹,

Hajičová²,

Buráňová³

2003

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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“…A possible way how to handle contextual relevance is to work with a hierarchy of the degrees of salience of the items of the stock of knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer (just mentioned, mentioned in the pevious co-text, known from the specific circumstances of the discourse, associated with one of the mentioned items, etc. ; see Hajicova and Vrbova, 1982).…”

Section: λ W [Supp · 3!y · Pre W Cay] and Pre W Causmentioning

confidence: 97%

An Attempt at a Framework for Semantic Interpretation of Natural Language

Peregrin¹,

Sgall²

1986

Theoretical Linguistics

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Due to the universality of natural language, no adequate formal framework for a description of its semantico-pragmatic aspects seems to have been found up to now. Natural language contains not only extensional and intensional contexts, but also sentences on attitudes, quotational (and other metalinguistic) contexts and paradoxes, so that it is a very complicated task to describe its semantics in full. To fulfil this task, it seems necessary to find a connection between the empirical semantico-pragmatic findings of linguistics and the results of intensional logic -i. e. between what Fillmore (1977) calls internal and external semantics. According to investigations combining empirical approaches studying the relationships between meaning and sound with methodological requirements brought by Chomsky into the study of syntax and by Montague into that of semantics, it appears to be necessary to work first of all with a level of linguistic meaning; at such a level the ambiguity of the surface sentences is removed, and every sentence is assigned one or more meanings, which in some cases can be shown to be paradoxical, i. e. to correspond to no proposition or to no truth value in any world. As was pointed out by Sgall, Hajicovä and Panevova (in press), this level can be understood as that of the underlying structure of sentences, i. e. in a certain way it combines the properties of Chomskyan "initial Pmarkers" and "logical form", differing from the latter in that it is understood as language specific and reflecting the structure of natural language sentences: no variables, parentheses, prenex quantifiers or similar devices are present at the level of linguistic meaning; instead of such devices, this level contains the articulation of the (meaning of the) sentence into topic and focus, various kinds of pronouns and similar items, from which the anaBrought to you by | University of California Authenticated Download Date | 6/8/15 3:12 AM

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“…We present here -similarly as with (1') in Section 3 above -highly simplified representations of these sentences, with parentheses for every dependent member and the symbols t, c, and f for contextual boundness; 1 Only immediate associative links are taken into account for the time being, such as those between (Czech) crown and money, or between TV or (its) signal and (its) viewer. 2 These tentative rules, which have been presented at several occasions (starting with Hajičová and Vrbová 1982) for the aims of a further discussion, still wait for a systematic testing and evaluation, as well as for enrichments and more precise formulations. These issues may find new opportunities now, when e.g.…”

Section: Illustrationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This scale, which was discussed by Hajičová and Vrbová (1982), has to be reflected in a description of the semantico-pragmatic layer of the discourse. In this sense our approach can be viewed as pointing to a useful enrichment of the existing theories of discourse representation (cf.…”

Section: Degrees Of Salience In a Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%