Talk by Herman Hendriks
Links without Locations
Vallduv\'{\i} identifies the informational primitives {\em focus\/}, {\em
link\/} and {\em tail\/}, and argues that the exploitation of information
states of hearers by the information-pachaging strategies of speakers reveals
that these states have at least the internal structure of a system of file
cards: links say {\em where\/}---on what file card---the focal information
goes, and tails indicate {\em how\/} it fits there. We give various reasons for
not believing this and propose to model information states as discourse
representation structures, without locations. This requires and leads to a
different perspective on the function of links. They signal non-monotone
anaphora: their discourse referent Y is anaphoric to an antecedent discourse
marker such that $\mbox{X}\not\subseteq\mbox{Y}$. This idea will be shown to
subsume `non-identity' anaphora, contrastive stress, pronoun referent
resolution, and restrictiveness of relatives and adjectives.
Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995