Word meaning, unification and sentence-internal pragmatics

Abstract

Recent important developments within Discourse Representation Theory include a more elaborate formalisation and account of presuppositional phenomena, as well as the integration into the theory of unification as a mode of composition. Focusing on these issues, the following claims are made: (i) the varying compositional impact of some adverbials, ranging from merely constraining the properties of a predicate to radically altering them, is suitably modeled applying unification, and (ii) pragmatic mechanisms like bridging, presupposition verification and accommodation can apply mainly sentence-internally for some lexical items. To substantiate these claims, the analysis will centre around the German causal preposition ’durch’ (’through’).