Marking Theme and Rheme in Preverbal Messages *

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (Steedman, 2000, 2006) shows that certain intonational patterns in English mark an utterance’s theme and rheme (L+H* and H*, respectively). The incremental conceptualiser (inC) can be extended to produce preverbal messages (semantic representations) containing the required marking of theme and rheme for pointing out a mismatch between the maps in the Map Task. This is done by applying alternative semantics (Rooth, 1992). Although alternatives sets are difficult to compute (Cohen, 1999), for the Map Task they are closely linked to the ‘magic circle’, which provides the prime places for possible contributions to the dialogue.