DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION THEORY AS A NEW APPROACH TO ANALYZE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE IN TEXT CORPORA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24919/2522-4565.2021.47.1Keywords:
information structure, give/new information, discourse representation theory, discourse referents, discourse representation structureAbstract
The article presents new modern concepts of sentence information structure examination and the possibility to apply them while investigating electronic synchronic and diachronic text corpora. It highlights methods and methodologies for elaborating an automated algorithm to analyze givenness and newness hierarchy in the discourse taking into account several types of contexts, as well as, alternatives for the utterance and its verity. It proves that given/new marking is related to the participants of communicative situation, viz. the speaker and the addressee. The utterance construction depends on the participants’ common ground in regards to the communicative situation, as well as, their attitude to it. The paper focuses on the discourse representation theory that provides mechanisms designed at text interpretation and its context retention. The instrument elaborated to search information should contain a separate file, which stores the records of all individuals, events, etc. (i.e., discourse referents), previously mentioned in the text along with the information on every individual. The main goal while analyzing givenness is to keep track of all discourse referents (DRs). Therefore, the speaker mentally builds a representation structure (RS). It has been found that such approach presupposes two aspects to be taken into account: reference domain and a set of criteria to construct the representation structure, which facilitates information decoding. Based on discourse representation theory such types of contexts were considered: a discourse context (which contains the previously mentioned discourse referents), an encyclopedic context (that may include such words as ‘the king’, ‘God’, etc.), a situational context and scenario context (which correlates with such generalizations as “All planes have pilots”). Hence, taking into account the highlighted context types, information in the text can be presented as given (nonspecific), given-activated, given-non-activated, accessible, situationally accessible, inferable, general, new (non-specified). Thus, the approach described has been implemented to analyze written records, allows framing an algorithm that provides information on sentence elements in different corpora.
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