Accent Interpretation, Anaphora Resolution and Implicature Derivation

Normally is not intended to incite the listener to speak ill of those people who are not his or her friends An accent on our friends does however change the meaning of the sentence in this direction In the aforementioned textbooks a remark on accent such as this one is usually presented as part of a discussion on informal logic which which bears little or no relation to the material on formal propositional and predicate logic in the same book This situation is owing to the fact that di erences in meaning related to accent have for a long time resisted formalization Since the inception of Discourse Representation Theory DRT Kamp Kamp Reyle the situation has changed DRT provides a formal basis for dealing with the meaning of accent Here I want to mention two contributions which exemplify the advances that have been made in this area Firstly there is Van Deemter a which deals with the in uence of accent on anaphora resolution Consider where accent is indicated with italics