There is as yet Insufficient Data for a Meaningful Answer

Abstract

International audienceFormal studies of discourse raise numerous interrogations on the nature and the definition of the way consecutive sentences combine with one another. The shift from discourse to dialogue brings forward even more specific issues. Dialogue acts are more intrinsically connected because of the dynamicity of the interaction. This article introduces a proof of concept of a formal compositional treatment of the relationship between consecutive utterances. Starting from neo-Davidsonian event semantics, we propose to use the relative response set as an intermediate set tool that allows us to define notions of question-answer correspondence, model the effect of clarification requests on previous utterances and compute semantic representations of dialogue interactions