It is puzzling how speakers, despite the apparent disfluency and disorganization of

everyday talk is able to take part in a conversation. In view of that, the Linguistic Discourse
Model (LDM) provides a uniform account of how speakers accomplish this task.
The Linguistic Discourse Model (LDM) is a comprehensive theory of the structural,
semantic and pragmatic relations obtaining among clauses in a discourse which has its goal to
account for how a semantic and pragmatic interpretation of a discourse may be built up from its
constituent clauses on a left to right, clause by clause basis (Polanyi, 1986). The LDM constructs
a structural representation of relations among the discourse segments that constitute a text.
This representation is realized as a Discourse Parse Tree.
The Discourse Parse Trees (DPT) are formed by attaching incoming dcu's (which are the
clauses themselves) to suitable accessible nodes on the existing Tree. The DPT specifies which
segments are coordinated to one another (lists of various types), which are subordinated to
other constituents (interruptions, elaborations), and which are related as constituents of logical,
language specific, rhetorical, genre specific or interactional structures (Culy et al., n.d). The
relationship of a newly processed dcu to the previous discourse will be reflected in how it finds
attachment point on the tree’s right edge.
The structure allows us to understand the links between clauses in a sentence and the
links between sentences in connected discourse and how they are understood in the actual
context. Polanyi (1995) argues that, for the correct interpretation of deixis, anaphors and in
general for drawing the right inferences emphasis is placed on the importance of finding the
relevant structural units. These are often determined by contexts such as the interaction, speech
event, genre unit, modality, polarity, and point of view which can change several times in a
single discourse.

References:

Livia Polanyi, Chris Culy, Martin van den Berg, Gian Lorenzo Thione & David Ahn (n.d). Sentential
structure and discourse parsing. Retrieved from https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W04-
0211.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2Y1rBSfGtmIP1URobp_fZVIhq4WpSEjSCmueg9-IQAnf1f4OJEYaqHmiU\

Polanyi, L (1986). The linguistic discourse model: towards a formal theory of discourse structure.
Retrieved from https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a188907.pdf

Polanyi, L (1995). The linguistic structure of discourse. Retrieved from

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.85.5029&rep=rep1&type=pdf