Denial and correction in Layered DRT
Emar Maier, Rob van der Sandt · 2003
The central characteristic of denials is that they perform a non-monotonic cor-rection operation on discourse structure. A second characteristic is that they may be used to object to various kinds of information including presuppositions and implicatures. In this paper we first use standard DRT to capture these fea-tures, implement an earlier proposal of van der Sandt (1991) in DRT and point out a shortcoming of that approach. We then adopt Layered DRT. LDRT is an extension of standard DRT designed to represent and interpret different types of information conveyed in a conversation by distributing them over separate layers of the same LDRS. We will then show how LDRT allows us to solve the prob-lems of the classic monostratal system. The resulting system makes use of a di-rected reverse anaphora mechanism to locate, remove and negate the material objected to. 1