Schlangen, D. and A. Lascarides [2003] A Compositional and Constraint-Based Approach to Non-Sentential Utterances, in Muller, S. (ed.) The Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, pp. 380--390, CSLI Publications.
We present an approach to non-sentential utterances like B's utterance
in the following dialogue:
A: Who came to the party?
B: Peter
Such utterances pose several puzzles: they convey `sentence-types' messages (propositions, questions, requests) while being of non-sentential form; and they are constrained by syntactically and semantically by the context. We address these puzzles in our approach which is compositional, since we provide a formal semantics of these utterances which is independent of context, and constraint-based because resolution is based on collecting contextual constraints.
@inproceedings{schlangen:lascarides:2002,
author = {D.~Schlangen and A.~Lascarides},
year = {2002},
title = {A Compositional and Constraint-Based Approach to Non-Sentential Utterances},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar},
pages = {380--390},
publisher = {{\sc csli}}
}