A discursive analysis of itineraries in an historical and regional corpus of travels

Richard Moot (1, 2) , Laurent Prévot (3) , Christian Retoré (1, 2)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 SIGNES - Linguistic signs, grammar and meaning: computational logic for natural language
3 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

In this paper we will discuss the application of (Segmented) Discourse Representation Theory and the Generative Lexicon to the analysis of a historical French corpus of itineraries in the Pyre ́ne ́es. Our research will focus in particular on how type coercion (Pustejovsky, 1995) can help us give a correct analysis of cases of so-called "fictive motion" (Talmy, 1999), which is evident is phrases like. (1) The road runs along the coast for two hours. (2) The path descended abruptly. This case is particular in that an entity (which is considered immobile and which, in the context, defines a path) is the subject of a movement verb and that the combination is interpreted as a generic statement about the nature of this path, without any movement necessarily taking place.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Linguistique

Richard Moot, Laurent Prévot, Christian Retoré. A discursive analysis of itineraries in an historical and regional corpus of travels: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in a unified type theoretical framework. Constraints in discourse, Sep 2011, Ayay-roches-rouges, France. http://passage.inria.fr/cid2011/doku.php. ⟨hal-00607691⟩