Why?

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2016
Host editors
  • J. Hunter
  • M. Simons
  • M. Stone
Book title SEMDIAL 2016 : JerSem
Book subtitle Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue : New Brunswick, NJ, 16-18 July 2016
Series Proceedings SemDial
Event 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue
Pages (from-to) 5-14
Publisher New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract Even casual dialogue contains instances of reasoning. A paradigmatic case is the usage of Why-questions that intuitively elicit a reason for something. We present a thorough analysis of Why-questions in dialogue from a rhetorical perspective. We specify the semantics of Why-questions, i.e., we define what the space of acceptable answers is, how this acceptability is itself up for further negotiation, and discuss some context-sensitive aspects of bare Why?. We formalise our model in a type-theoretical framework.
Document type Conference contribution
Language English
Published at https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/r.fernandezrovira/papers/2016/why-semdial2016.pdf http://events.illc.uva.nl/semdial/proceedings/semdial2016_jersem_proceedings.pdf
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Why (Final published version)
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