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<Paper uid="P95-1045">
  <Title>Polyphony and Argumentative Semantics</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Certain utterance structures contain linguistic clues that constrain their interpretation on an argumentative basis. The following example illustrates these  constraints: I was robbed yesterday...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> (1) ...but luckily I had little money. (2) ...but luckily I had a little money. (3) ...but unfortunately I had little money. (4) ...but unfortunately I had a little money.  We describe and compute the signification of such sentences by specifying how the key words (in italics) constrain the argumentative power of the terminal sub-sentences (TSS) &amp;quot;I was robbed yesterday&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I had money&amp;quot;. They may all be interpreted in a relevant context, but hints for recognizing the need of an &amp;quot;odd&amp;quot; context are given. For instance, in (1) and (2), the robbery is considered bad because of the opposition introduced by &amp;quot;but&amp;quot;, to something considered happy because of &amp;quot;luckily&amp;quot;. Holding money is considered good in (2) and bad in (1) because of the general structure of the sentence and the opposition between &amp;quot;little&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;a little&amp;quot;. In (3) and (4), the robbery is considered good, while in (3) money is normally considered good too, and in (4) (the oddest) it is considered bad (imagine a speaker who * This research is supported by SNCF, Direction de la Recherche, D6partement RP, 45 rue de Londres, 75379 Paris Cedex 08 France.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> usually likes to be robbed just to see the disappointment because he holds no money). We see on these examples that TSS's are argumentatively ambiguous and modifiers constrain them.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In this paper we propose, for a given utterance, the construction of the signification of the underlying sentence, which captures its polyphonic and argumentative aspects. The signification of a sentence is viewed as the application of an argumentative super-structure to the signification of TSS's, free of operators or connectives. The signification must finally be interpreted in the context of the utterance.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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