ARGUMENTATION IN REPRESENTATION SEMANTICS * 
Pierre-Yves RACCAH 
ERA 430 - C.N.R.S. 
Conseil d'Etat 
Palais Royal 
75100 Paris RP 
ABSTRACT 
It seems rather natural to admit that 
language use is governed by rules that relate 
signs, forms and meanings to possible intentions 
or possible interpretations, in function of 
utterance situations. Not less natural should seem 
the idea that the meaning of a natural language 
expression conveys enough material to the input of 
these rules, so that, given the situation of 
utterance, they determine the appropriate 
interpretation. If this is correct, the semantic 
description of a natural language expression 
should output not only the 'informative content' 
of that expression, but also all sorts of 
indications concerning the way this expression may 
be used or interpreted. In particular, the 
argumentative power of utterances is due 
to argumentative indications conveyed by the 
sentences uttered, indications that are not part 
of their informative content . This paper 
emphasizes the role of argumentation in language 
and shows bow it could be accounted for in a 
formal Representation Semantics framework. An 
"example of an analysis is provided in order to 
show the "system at work". 
I. ARGUMENTATION AND THE SEMANTIC PROGRAM. 
A. What is linguistic in argumentation. 
The theory of argumentation developped by 
Jean-Claude Anscombre and Oswald Ducrot is an 
attempt to describe some aspects of language that 
have not been carefully studied yet, in spite of 
their importance for linguistic theory, discourse 
representation, as well as simulation of 
understanding. 
In their framework, utterances are seen to be 
produ@ed in order to argue for some particular 
conclusions with a certain force, depending on the 
situation of utterance. Thus, when I utter 
(I) This is beautiful but expensive 
in front of a shop window and pointing to some 
item, I present my utterance as a reason for not 
buying this item, ~hile if I say 
(2) This is expensive but beautiful 
*This work has been supported in part by a 
contract with the Centre National de la Recherche 
Scientifique (contrat~n ° 95. 5122) 
I am giving a reason to buy the item I. 
Note that after uttering(l), I can perfectly 
walk into the store and buy the item : what is odd, 
in normal situations is to say (I') 
(l') This is beautiful but expensive, and 
therefore, I will buy it. 
Anscombre and Ducrot unburied the old 
Aristotelician concept of topoi to describe the 
movement from the utterance to the conclusion. They 
take these topoi to be of the form : 
(To) The more X is P, the more Y is Q. 
where 'X is P' is the idea expressed by the 
original utterance, and 'Y is Q' is the 
argumentative orientation (the conclusion argued 
for by producing the original utterance in the 
particular situation in which it is uttered). In 
Raccah 84, I have argued for the adequacy of a 
slightly different form for the topoi, which takes 
into account the epistemical relation of the 
speaker to the p~miss : 
(T) The more evidence I have in favor of X being P 
The more arguments l'have in favor of Y 
being Q. 
Topoi of this kind are shown to avoid problems with 
non-gradual properties and, I argue, are closer to 
the intuition we have about the argumentative 
process 2. 
The description of argumentative connectives 
provides rules to select the argumentative 
orientation of a compounded utterance in function 
of the more basic utterances that they connect. 
Thus, the analysis of (1), (i'), and (2) 
suggests the following description of the 
argumentative aspects of but : 
in any utterance of P but Q, the presence of 
but 
Ii am talking here of normal situations , where 
expensiveness is a reason not to buy, while beauty 
is a reason to buy 
2The idea is that it is not the degree of P-uess of 
X (when this means something) that makes Y (more or 
less) Q, but the degree to which the speaker 
believes X is P that entitles him (her) to believe 
(more or less) that Y is Q. 
525 
- requires that the utterances of P and Q be 
interpreted as oriented towards opposite 
conclusions, 
- indicates that the complex utterance is oriented 
towards the conclusion towards which Q is 
oriented. 
Following the example of Occam's -disposable- 
razor, I think that when there is a con~non 
property for all utterances of the same sentence, 
ther~ ought to be, in the description of the 
sentence, some features that enable the utterance 
de--~-~ptlon to state this common property of the 
different utterances. In other words, at the 
output of the sentence semantics level of 
analysis, there ought to be something that should 
be taken as input to the pragmatic level and will 
enable it to formulate the argumentative 
properties common to all utterances of the same 
sentence, l call the study of this something 
"pre-argumentative analysis". The reason why I 
talk of "disposable" razor is that it is through 
utterance analysis that we discover the 
interesting properties of sentences. So that we 
need, for heuristic reasons, to use the pragmatic 
analysis in order to know what kind of output we 
want for the sentence analysis : we dispose of the 
razor only after using it... 
B. What is argumentative in semantics. 
In spite of this slight methodological 
incursion into pragmatics, my concern is for 
sentence semantic analysis. I postulate a semantic 
level of sentence analysis such that : 
- no information about the world or the speaker's 
(or hearer's) beliefs are taken into account at 
this level; 
- all of the informative meaning carried by the 
sentence can be represented at this level (in 
particular, the logical information as well as the 
conventional implicature ; 
- the pre-argumentative aspects of the sentence 
are described at this level; 
the representation of meaning and the 
description of pre-argumentation are both 
conpositional ; 
- information about the world and beliefs only 
need to be added at the next level of analysis to 
get full interpretations of the utterances of the 
sentence. 
Note that I do not claim that models of this kind 
have any psychological reality, not even any 
chance to be good candidates, as such, for 
computer simulating of understanding. Thus my 
claim of autonomy of semantics (including 
pre-argumentation) towards pragmatics is neither 
an ontological claim nor a claim of technical 
efficiency, but rather an epistemic one. This way 
of analyzing language aims at answering some 
linguistic and methodological questions, and it is 
as such that I wish it be tested for its 
applicability to Artificial Intelligence. 
Among the theories sharing these assumptions, 
I would like to speak about what I 
call Representation Semantics : a theory of 
meaning representation for sentences, inspired by 
Montague 73 for its formal aspects, but diverging 
from it in its more fundamental issues. 
Representation Semantics uses the tools developped 
by Montague but, instead of aiming at describing 
the meaning of a sentence, as a result of its 
semantic analysis, it only pretends to give, as 
its output, a representation of some aspects of 
its meaning : partial models of the 
presuppositional contentpthe informative content, 
and the pre-argu=entative content of the 
sentence I . I use Karttunen and Peters' 
conventional implicature framework 2 , as a 
pre-selection of possible models for representing 
the meaning of sentences. This is shown to avoid 
the classical paradox of the 
presupposltion/entailment relationship 3 , Meaning 
representations for sentences include 
pre-argumentative features in such a way that, 
given the situation and the adequate topoi, the 
argumentation of an utterance -in that situation 
and within the corresponding cultural frame- of 
the sentence analyzed can be computed. 
II. OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF MEANING 
REPRESENTATION. 
A. Ingredients. 
A detailed presentation of the theory would 
require a long and careful discussion of the 
concepts involved in it (some of which have 
already been discussed in Raccah 80, 82 and 83), a 
justification of their raison d'@tre and of their 
articulation within the theory. However 
interesting, these technical and foundational 
aspects do not fit this paper (both for material 
and strategical reasons). Nevertheless, I would 
like to briefly sketch the great lines of the 
analysis process suggested by the theory . 
The following diagram should partially 
illustrate this point. 
Isee Kamp 80, for the informative content ; Raccah 
80 or 83 for the presuppositional and informative 
contents and Bruxelles-Raccah 83 and Raccah 84 for 
preliminary discussions about the ~ 
re-argumentative content. 
Karttunen and Peters 79. 
3cf. Raccah 82. 
526 
semantic analysis I 
S-) . tree2-Itra?s- L/Rl~\[represenL/--~ 
.... ~ " ~P2\[| tati°n JIM2/ 
Ix--/ 
I 
Where|: 
S is a sentenc~l expresses what is presupposed 
P2 expresses what is asserted 
R1 expresses conditions on argumentation 
R2 expresses pre-argumentation 
M1 is a model representing P1 
M2 is a model representing P2. 
Each sentence is given one (or more, if ambiguous) 
analysis tree by the syntactic module. Each tree 
is then 'decomposed' into four formulae : one for 
the presupposition, one for the asserted 
informative content, one for conditions on 
argumentation, and one for pre-argumentation. The 
first two 'decompositions' can be obtained by the 
use of Karttunen and Peters' method, inspired by 
Montague's translation function 2. They both lead 
to the construction of a partial model, say one of 
the smallest models satisfying P1 for the 
presupposition, and one of the smallest models 
satisfying both P1 and P2, for what is asserted. 
An example of constructions of this kind is given 
by Kamp's discourse representations (Kamp 80) 
B. yes, but what about argumentation ? 
Conditions on argumentation are imposed mainly 
by the use of connectives (like but, however, 
even~ etc.). A semantic description of these 
connectives states, among other things, the 
~elationship between the possible argumentative 
orientations of the utterances connected =. 
Formulae expressing these conditions on 
argumentation will only appear in sentences 
containing this kind of connectives, since I 
haven't found, as yet, simple sentences imposing 
conditions on argumentation. ~le form of this kind 
of formulae is shown in the discussion of the 
example. 
Pre-argumentation is a theorical construct 
much harder to justify on empirical grounds than 
anyone of the other three~. Its theoretical 
justification, however, is easy to see : The topoi 
apply to some semantic indications in order to 
1 Please recall that this process is not intented 
to be a model of how humans actually deal with 
language nor a suggestion about how a computer 
should be structured : it stems from an external 
epistemic view of language. 
2 See Montague 73, Karttunen and Peters 79, and 
Raccah 80. 
form argumentative orientations of utterances. 
These indications cannot be equated with 
the informative content of the sentence, for two 
reasons : 
(i) the same sentence, say "It is 8 o'clock", can 
be used in an argumentation whose premiss is 'it 
is late', as well as in an argumentation whose 
premiss is 'it is early'. We will have to take the 
sentence "It is 8 o'clock" to be 
pre-argumentatively ambiguous, while 
its informative content is not. 
(ii) Adverbs of degree (rather, very, 
extremely .... ) usualy do not modify the 
argumentative orientation of utterances (while 
they change the informative content of the 
sentence uttered) : they indicate the force with 
which the utterance, as it is presented, argues 
for the orientation. For example, if I say "This 
car is very expensive" as an argument for not 
buying it, it is not the very-expensiveness of the 
car that makes the argument, but its 
expensiveness; what the use of '~ery" says is that 
my arguments for not buying the car are stronger 
because my evidence for its expensiveness is 
stronger : in fact I even have enough evidence to 
say that it is very expensive. 
Formulae expressing the pre-argumentation 
will also express the pre-argumentatlve value 
ascribed to it by these indications. The form of 
these formulae (which can certainly be improved) 
is ~cl~ where c is a logical expression 
(stan6i ~n for the pre-orientation) and ~ is an 
index standing for the pre-argumentative value. 
III. AN EXAMPLE. 
I will now show, in an example analysis of a 
particular sentence, how the theory builds 
descriptions of the different aspects of the 
meaning, and how these descriptions are connected 
to one another and to eventual pragmatic 
information, in order to allow an interpretation 
of the possible utterances of the sentence. 
Suppose we want to analyse the sentence 
5 This position, however, assumes the hypothesis 
that any utterance of a complex sentence 
containing an argumentative connective can be 
considered as a complex utterance, i.e. an 
utterance which can be decomposed into two 
utterances linked with this connective. See 
Bruxelles-Raccah 83 for a discussion of this 
hypothesis. 
4Fortunately, this kind of justifications do not 
concern us here, but I realize that even the ugly 
notion of informative content seems to have more 
intuitive backup than this one : a story to be 
continued... 
527 
(3) The present king of France is very old but 
he plays Jazz. 
in a cultural context where it is believed that a) 
old people tend not to like Jazz, and 
b) people who play Jazz tend to like it. 
Note that there are very many other things 
believed about old people, such as (a') 
(a') old people tend to be wise, 
and many other things believed about people who 
play Jazz, such as (b') 
(b') people who play Jazz tend to wake up late in 
the morning. 
We will take the topos expressing (a) to be 
the rule : 
Where 0 stands for old, L for like and "#i, for 
Jazz I, and the topos expressing ~--to be the rule 
Where ~ stands for play. 
Suppose now that the analysis of (4) 
(4) The present king of France is very old 
gives the following four formulae : 
Rl(4) : R2(4) f O( ~I~K(51} ~ 
where K , V~) mean "present king of France", 
and "very old", ~ ~(~) means "the unique x 
such that ~(~)# , ~ " • s truth. PI(4) says that 
(4) presupposes that there is a unique entity 
which is the present king of France ; P2(4) says 
that (4) asserts that this entity is very old ; 
RI(4) says that (4) imposes no conditions on 
argumentation ; and R2(4) says that (4) is 
pre-oriented towards whatever conclusion can be 
infered from the present king of France being old, 
and that the conclusion will obtain with a force, 
Similarily, suppose that the analysis of (5): 
I This is terribly sloppy (the symbolic language 
used is not defined) and incomplete (for instance, 
there should be an indication of conditions on the 
application of the topos), but it doesn't affect 
my purpose. 
(5) He (the present king of France) plays Jazz 
gives the following four formulae : 
P2(S)Rl(5) ~Ci,?k~c~)J 
with similar interpretation. 
If, in addition, we have a formal description 
of but in accordance to what has been suggested in 
section I, we account, in a compositional way, for 
all of the four aspects of (3) which are examined 
here : let us see this in some detail. 
The formal description of but is 
following 
P1 (X but Y) : Pl(x) A PI(Y) 
P2 (X but Y) : P2(x)~ P2(Y) 
R1 (X but Y) : Topos/R2 (Y) = ~Topos/R2 (x) 
R2 (X but Y) : R2(Y) 
the 
~ere the first expression says that what is 
presupposed by X but Y is the conjunction of what 
is presupposed by X and what is presupposed by Y ; 
the second expression says that what is asserted 
by X but Y is the conjunction of what is asserted 
by X and what is asserted by Y ; the third 
expression says that the topoi that can be 
selected are those which are such that their 
application to the respective pre-orientations of 
X and Y leads to opposite formulae (i.e. such that 
the argumentative orientations of the 
corresponding utterances of X and Y are opposite); 
the last expression says that the pre-orientation 
of X bu~Y is that of Y. 
Applying this description of but to (4) and 
(5) leads to the following description of (3) : 
pl (3) : H~(~)+-->~ ~) 
which corresponds to the actual interpretations of 
(3). In particular, this description correctly 
predicts that, without further information about 
the context of utterance, the pair of topoi that 
are naturally selected to interpret (3) is (Ta,Tb) 
rather than the other three possibilities 
mentioned here. In fact, to \[elect (Ta,Tb') , we 
would have to believe tha~o like Jazz and to 
wake up late in the morning are incompatible while 
believing that people who play Jazz tend to wake 
up late in the morning. If we wanted to select 
(Ta',Tb) we would have to believe that to be wise 
and to like Jazz are opposed : this is a possible 
528 
choice, and an utterance of (3) where these topoi 
were forced by some additional contextual 
information would be likely to shock some people 
(including myself). Finally, if we wanted to 
select (Ta',~b') , we would have to believe that 
to be wise and to wake up late in the morning are 
opposed : another possible choice, that might have 
more adepts than ~ the last one. 
The theory is still young ; its formal version is 
even younger, and certainly very imperfect. 
However, it is the only theory on the "market" 
(and for that reason, the first one...) which 
examines this aspect of semantics, and offers a 
basis for a conception of a Natural Language 
Processor that might "grasp the idea" expressed by 
a text and not only retrieve pieces of 
information. 
A computer version of a small fragment of 
French is now at study. The programming languages 
used for this study are PROLOG and LISP. The 
programming of syntax and of the informative 
aspects of semantic~ follows the ideas of Friedman 
and Warren 78 ar~79 and of Hobhs and Rosenschein 
78. For the pre-argumentative aspects and topoi 
rules, nothing had been done before and much 
remains to be done... 
IV REFERENCES 
Anscombre, Jean-Claude and Oswald Ducrot : 
L'argumentation dans la lan~ue, Mardaga, 
Bruxelles, 1983. 
Bruxelles, Sylvie and Pierre-Y~es Raccah : 
"L'analyse Argumentative" report on CNRS 
project n ° 95.5122 : Intelligence 
Artificielle 82, Paris, 1983. 
Friedman, Joyce and David S. Warren : "A parsing 
method for Montague Grammar", Linguistics 
and Philosophy, 1978, vol. 2. 
"Using semantics in non-context-free parsing 
of Montague Gra,,nar" ; Department of Computer 
Sciences, University of Michigan, 1979. 
Hobbs, Jerry and Stanley Rosenschein : "Making 
computational sense of Montague's 
Intensionnal Logic", Artificial Intelligence 
9, 1978. 
Kemp, Hans : "A theory of truth and semantic 
representation" in Groenendijk et el, eds. 
Formal Methods in the Study of Language, 
Amsterdam, 1980. 
Karttunen, Lauri and Stanley Peters : 
"Conventional Implicature", in Syntax and 
Semantics, vol.11, Oh and Dinnen, eds. New 
York 1979. 
Montague, Richard : "The Proper Treatment of 
Quantification in Ordinary English" (1973), 
reprint in Thomason, ed. Formal Philosophy, 
Yale University Press, 1974. 
Raccah, Pierre-Yves : "Formal Understanding" 
Semantlkos 4,2 1980. 
"Presupposition, Signification et 
Implication" Semantikos 6:2, 1982 
"Presupposition et Intension" HEL 5:2, 1983. 
"Argumentation et Raisonnement Implicite", in 
Les Modes de raisonnement proceedings of the 
2nd t~onference on f.ognitive ~ciences, 
University of Paris, 1984. 
529 
