Talk by Martin H. van den Berg

Discourse Grammar and Dynamic Logic

Existing theories of Dynamic Semantics provide us with a very powerful formal apparatus to express the linking of anaphora with their antecedent. However, less attention is paid to the identification of the antecedent, particular in the Dynamic Logic formalisms. In my dissertation, where I use a variant of DPL (called FDPL) to formalize the dynamics of arbitrary quantifiers and plurals, I also did not discuss the resolution mechanism. In this paper, a Discourse Grammar, based on the Linguistic Discourse Model (Polanyi 1984) and on the work on discourse grammar for VP-ellipsis (Pr\"ust et.al. 1995), is define, that has FDPL as its semantic component and makes linguistically reasonable predications about anaphora resolution.

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Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995