| Discourse is"the totality of codified linguistic usages attached to a given type of social practice". The chief function of discourse is to transfer meaning in communication, and semantics is the core in discourse studies. Discourse Semantics (DS) is the study of the meaning of any language complex beyond the scale of sentence.Discourse semantics is just at the beginning both in theoretical and empirical studies. By far researchers have not yet made consistent and systematic description or analysis on the phenomena and facts concerning discourse meaning. In a sense, discourse semantics has become the bottle-neck to restrain full processing of natural discourse. Consequently, there is an emergent call for comprehensive and sufficient studies in this area.Studies on discourse meaning have a long history, but Discourse Semantics as a branch of linguistics was not acknowledged until by the 1980s, when several research schools address to the topic from different perspectives. As the approaches adapted by these schools are so diversified, it cannot be truly said that DS has developed into a full-fledged research paradigm, in particular that there still lack a widely acknowledged theoretical framework and practical methodology in the field. Even the notion of"discourse semantics as an entity"has not been clearly raised and defined. In fact, researchers have been treating DS as a subtopic or a subdivision of psychology and/or Discourse Analysis, putting premium on the psychological aspects of DS, with the linguistic aspects largely less attended.This dissertation is a tentative study on Discourse Semantics which attempts, first, to build up a comprehensive and holistic framework that incorporates the processes of discourse semantic analysis in terms of knowledge integration, information management and inference forming, and then, to develop a representative mechanism to formalize such an analytical and constructive procedure. In general, the model of discourse semantics here includes three parts: the analysis of semantic sources and contents of a discourse, the analysis of the semantic structure, and the representation of discourse meaning.For the convenience to analyze the contents and structure of discourse meaning, the paper breaks down the analytical process into four levels, i.e. the under-clause level, the clause level, the inter-clause relations, and the discourse level. It should be clearly noted in advance that such four levels are an arbitrary classification for the sake of technical processing, which is by no means to say that they are natural and autonomous boundaries or levels of discourse semantics. In fact, it is rather common to find that, in a discourse, the processing of some language items simultaneously involve more than one levels of semantic analysis.Language items in discourse are taken as"constructions", a notion borrowed from Construction Grammar, which displays constraints between form and meaning. The notion of"form-meaning constraint"is the main thread running through the process of discourse semantic analysis and representation. From the constraint perspective, it first analyzes the sources of discourse meaning from words to clauses, till to the discourse level, and then incorporates the contents of such sources into an integrated system.Studies in DS can be classified into four major schools. First, the European Continental School took initiatives in the area in the 1980s. From the psycholinguistic perspective, researches usually follow the pattern of language comprehension in mental mechanism while analyzing discourse semantics. Chief researches and achievements in this school are van Dijk's Macrostructure theory. Seuren gave a different picture in Discourse Semantics, in which DS is reduced to incremental values of sentence meanings, determined not only be truth-conditional computation but also by discourse computation. However, Seuren's model overlooks the function of discourse patterns.Second, the Sydney School studies DS within the research paradigm of Systemic and Functional Grammar (SFG). From the sociological view, discourse is taken as social semiotics which fulfils the communication of ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning. Chief achievements of DS in this school are Appraisal Theory and Periodicity Theory. As a result, DS is not an independent branch of linguistic study, for it is just a level or a division of language analysis in SFG.The third school is with the study of formal semantics in the U.S., which is known as Dynamic Semantics. Influential theory in this respect is Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), and its revision of Standard Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). DS in this approach is based on truth values of sentences, which are computed and represented by rigid signs and formulae.The fourth school is the American Functional School, mainly in the fields of Functional Grammar and Discourse Analysis. Research findings in information structure, topic and focus, reference identification, etc. have enhanced understandings in discourse meaning. As a result studies about theories and methodology in discourse semantics are brought to a new stage.Besides, in researches of discourse comprehension in psychology, Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model and Gernsbacher's Structure-Building Model provide different but comprehensive framework for the processing of discourse segments in the mental mechanism, which are highly helpful in guiding linguistically semantic processing of discourse meaning.DS in China is just at the beginning, with only a few papers in the area, all of them in the Systemic Functional Grammar approach.DS from the psycholinguistic approach gives an account of semantic processing in light of psychological mechanism, but the manner of observation and analysis on language data is discrete, which means that it may neglect some crucial linguistic aspects concerning discourse meaning. DS in formal semantics is accurate, concise, and nonambiguous, but it fails to account for context-sensitive sentences whose truth values are not clear or even without truth values. The functional approach gives comprehensive and systematic analysis for DS, but it requires a representative formalism to record the analytical procedure and the construction of discourse semantic structure.The research addresses two fundamental questions. One is to what extent DS can be reduced to linguistic entities. In other words, how can we say DS is derived from language facts? As discourse is"language in use", discourse semantics naturally involves social and psychological factors, among other things. Then, how much can we say that DS is linguistic? And how much social and/or psychological?In this research, discourse semantics is treated as linguistic entities. This question is further addressed in several subquestions. First, what are the sources of discourse semantics? Is DS from words, sentences, or discourse? Second, can we obtain meaning from the structure of a discourse by analyzing text organization? Third, does DS have a semantic structure? What is it like?The other question is how to describe and represent DS. That is, how can we represent the analytical results of semantic contents and structure of a discourse in a consistent and systematic formal mechanism?The semantic view of this research is holism in language philosophy. Hence compositionality and holistic nature of discourse are treated on a par in this model. This model starts from building up semantic contents to form a structure of discourse meaning in the bottom-up fashion, and in the meantime, it also takes into serious account of the holistic features of discourse as conventional patterns in the top-down fashion. What's more, according to holism, linguistic system is not modular. Therefore, the distinction of four levels of semantic analysis in this dissertation is simply for analytical convenience. It is by no means to say that any level is a natural and self-contained part of DS. In fact, there are interconnections and cross-references among them.In theory, the research is based on two foundations: theories in Discourse Analysis (or Text Linguistics) and that in Construction Grammar. Following the principle of constraints between form and meaning, it first carries out thorough analysis on semantic contents and semantic structure of discourse, which are treated as linguistic entities of DS. These semantic entities are incorporated in a representational formalism in terms of attribute-value matrix, displayed in the shape of box diagrams.The research takes a theoretic-model approach to DS, but further reduces semantics to manageable proportions. By an analytical and critical review of previous theories in related areas, the dissertation first establish for itself a scaffolding of discourse semantic analysis, and then set up a framework of representation formalism. Then it supplies with language data to test the operational feasibility of such model.In general, the research consists of three parts, which are contents, structure, and representation of discourse semantics respectively. It first accounts for the sources of discourse meaning, i.e. words and sentences; then it discusses semantic structure of discourse meaning in terms of organizational relations and discourse patterns; in the end it provides a representative formalism for the former two parts.A language item stands for a correspondence between form and meaning, with inevitable constraints between the two sides. Such constraints give indication to the direction and the manner of how to process such an item in a discourse: either to enhance the previous information unit by projecting the new information on it if the constraints are closely related, or to suppress the previous information if the constraints are opposite, or to establish a new information unit if the constraints are irrelevant. Constraints in discourse semantic contents and structure are analyzed in four levels.1. Information and properties beneath the clause level. Information and properties which contribute to discourse semantics in this level are in three categories: 1) the independent procedural information, 2) forms of phrases and their accessibility, and 3) functions of key words in facilitating interpretation of other language items and in forming inference by activating a situational frame.2. Information and properties at the clause level. Clauses constitutes the basic units of discourse meaning. Semantic analyses of clauses in discourse are carried out in three stages: 1) argument structure analysis, to get the basic information of its conceptual meaning and logical structure, 2) information structure analysis, to capture properties of information distribution within the clauses, and 3) construction analysis, to include the constructional meaning of the clause as a whole.3. Information and properties of inter-clausal relations. Clause relations in nature are semantics relations, which are classified into two categories according to the surface linguistic expressions: 1) clause relations with linguistic signals and 2) those without. For the former, there are two types: i) those connected with connectives and ii) those connected by grammatical structures. For the latter, clauses are connected by forming inference.4. Information and properties of discourse as a whole. Discourse patterns are conventional constructions, also with correspondence between the function and form of discourse, which are analyzed in terms of genres and text types respectively. This section puts particular emphasis on the holistic features and functions of discourse. Among the four levels, the first two belong to the contents of discourse semantic analysis, while the latter two are the structure of discourse semantic analysis. Those two categories constitute the linguistic entities of discourse analysis, thus forming one unified respect of DS in this model.The other respect in the model is the representational mechanism, i.e. formalism of DS. The model describes semantic entities and relations in DS in terms of feature structures, which take the shape of (embedded) box diagrams.The research proves that we can establish an integrated and holistic framework to account for the analysis and representation of DS according to constraints between form and meaning. On one hand, it not only simulates the procedure of building up meaning from words, sentences, till to discourse in the bottom-up way, but also accounts for the functions and properties of discourse against its components in the top-down way. On the other hand, it incorporates the analytical procedure into a representational formalism, thus giving a full description to discourse semantic processing.The research also has some limitations. The approach is fundamentally a retrospective one, in that it first sets up a theoretical model and then support with language facts to prove it. Naturally, it calls for more language data to test the feasibility of such a model in natural language processing and then to improve or amend it. Besides, during analysis the language data are not distinguished between English and Chinese, but they may be very different in nature. As a tentative attempt to develop a representative formalism for DS, much of it is rather crude, and in need of fine elaboration in future research.
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