In formal
linguistics,
discourse representation theory (
DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a
formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional
Montagovian approaches is that DRT includes a level of abstract
mental representations (discourse representation structures, DRS) within its formalism, which gives it an intrinsic ability to handle meaning across sentence boundaries. DRT was created by
Hans Kamp in 1981. A very similar theory was developed independently by
Irene Heim in 1982, under the name of
File Change Semantics (FCS).