Towards a DRT-based account of adversative connectors

Abstract

The paper presents an exploratory DRT-based account of the adversative connector doch. It is assumed that doch is weakly ambiguous between various relations of contrast, and an underspecified meaning is defined in the framework of UDRT Reyle et al. (2005). It is shown how in concrete discourse, a particular reading is selected from the underspecified meaning representation, depending on the information structure of the sentence, as well as on the syntactic and prosodic properties of the respective doch-use. This process is modelled in the framework of the most recent version of DRT Kamp et al. (2005) and the version of DRT that takes into consideration the focus-background division of the sentence Kamp (2004).