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<Paper uid="C96-1057">
  <Title>Disambiguation by Information Structure in DRT</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="334" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> German erst is ambigous. Consider the following examples: (1) Peter zeigte erst auf die vierte Gliickszahl. a) Und dann auf die zweite.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> (Peter first pointed to the fourth lucky number. And then to the second.) b) Nicht zuvor auf die erste, zweite oder dlqtte. (Peter only pointed to the fourth lucky number. Not to the first, second or third.) c) Noeh nieht aufdie Nnfte.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (Peter only pointed to the fourth lucky number so far. Not yet to the fifth.) The alternative contexts a) - e) determine the meaning of the first sentence of (1) according to *This paper describes research done within the Sonderforschunsbereich 3~0 at IMS. I would like to thank Anette Frank, Hans Kamp, Michael Schiehlen and the other members of the IMS semantics group for helpfull discussion.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> the disambiguating translations presented. 'rhe example testifies the following three uses of crsl: * In the context (1.a), the recipient understands the introduced event as the first of a sequence of events that he expects to be completed by the following text. We call this reading: the First of a Sequence-reading (FS).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * In the context (1.b), the recipient understands erst as a signal of the speaker/writer that the occurrence of the reported event is not preceded by the occurrence of similar (alternative) events. We call this reading: the Exclusion of Preceding Alternativesreading (EPA).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> * In the context (1.c), the recipient understands the event as element of a sequence of events, and the realization of the sequence, in particular the reported realization of the event at the textual perspective time, seems to be in retardation, with regard to some (previous) expectation about the realization dates of the sequence. We call this reading: the Retardation-reading (R).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> As can be seen from the example, the contextual disambiguation not only is needed for understanding the text, but is a prerequisite for high quality translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> In the literature, different lbrmalizations have been discussed ((KSn79), (LSb89), (Kgn91), (HR81) (the latter one for the similar noch and schon) and others). With respect to the focus adverb use (the cases (1.b) and (1.c); (1.a) being an example of the temporal adverb use), rnodellings are prevailing that associate ers* with different scales (cf. (I~5b89)). However, a precise evaluation of the context that can decide about the relevant reading (for instance, what information defines which scale) is still missing. We tackle this problem in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) (Kam81), assuming that discourse representations (DRSs) may be augmented by information structure.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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