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We present an approach to the interpretation of non-sentential utterances like B's utterance in the following mini-dialogue:
A: "Who came to the party?"
B: "Peter."
Such utterances pose several puzzles: they convey 'sentence-type' messages (propositions, questions or request) while being of non-sentential form; and they are constrained both semantically and syntactically by the context. We address these puzzles in our approach which is compositional, since we provide a formal semantics for such fragments independent of their context, and constraint-based because resolution is based on collecting contextual constraints.
In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS) / information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level—that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions.