The development of a formal model relating the syntactic, semantic, and discourse level analyses of texts will be investigated. This model will be organized around the notion of "discourse events" which involve the creation, modification, or manipulation of the propositional structure contributed by sentence constituents. Along with the development of the formal models, computational support for the analysis to texts in terms of the model will be implemented. With such support, a large collection of analyzed texts and utterances will be accumulated. The model will also serve as the specification for the design and implementation of integrated natural language understanding programs. The primary methods to be employed will include unification based grammar formalisms and logic programming techniques. The theoretical background for the approach will be based on the analysis of "speech acts" by Searle, the "projection semantics" of Halvorsen and Kaplan, and the lexical functional" approach to grammar developed by Kaplan and Bresnan, as well as the techniques for implementing all of these, developed by the PI. It is important to understand the contributions that all linguist levels make to the workings of texts. The discourse events model is meant to serve as a way to organize the analysis of those contributions.
