Layered DRT

The information conveyed by any utterance is a motley ensemble. Utterances carry content about the world as it is according to the speaker, but also about speakers’ attitudes, the way they speak, what has been said before, and so on. There are many kinds of information that are conveyed by way of language, and differences in kind correlate with differences in status. Presupposed information exhibits a distinctive projection behaviour; conversational implicatures are cancellable in a way that asserted information is not; a pronoun’s gender may help to determine a referent, but is otherwise truth-conditionally inert; and so on. Interpreting utterances is as much a matter of integrating these various kinds of information as of keeping them apart. This much is uncontroversial. As far as we are aware, however, no attempts have been made thus far to devise a fully general framework within which processes of information integration can be modeled. There are partial theories, to be sure. For example, there are quite a few well-developed analyses of the interaction between presupposed and non-presupposed content. But to the best of our knowledge the problem of information integration as such has not been addressed before. So that is what this paper is about: a general framework for representing and integrating all and sundry kinds of information that can be conveyed by linguistic means. This may seem like a grandiose project, and perhaps it is, but it is less ambitious than one might think. Our aim in this paper is to develop a framework for representing different kinds of linguistic and