Nonlinguistic aspects of linguistic contexts

Abstract

Our paper works on a proposal recently put forward by Hunter, Asher and Lascarides (2018) on the use of events in discourse context. We basically accept their view and their proposal of using events as explanation in discourse context. However we think that a stricter connection with demonstrations and causal reasoning in everyday conversation is a necessary step in a coherent view of discourse context. We will not deal with any particular formalism, but only with the general problem of taking into account some elements that may simplify or explain what is taken for granted in some steps of our inferences. A central concept used in these setting is the concept of “explanation” as a way to give coherence to the discourse context. This kind of explanation is also based, besides elements of a general encyclopedic knowledge, on default assumptions derived by the ontology present in the lexicon as Asher (2011) has abundantly shown. However, the steps to recover such coherence would gain clarity with a better specification of causal explanation and with a more precise account of the relation between demonstrative and demonstrations in discourse context. On these two aspects we give some suggestions.