Talk by David Milward

Integrating Situations into a Theory of Discourse Anaphora

Situation based approaches to anaphora have the advantage of fitting anaphora into a more general picture which includes deictic reference and attributive descriptions. However, it has been noted that, at least for pronominal anaphora, the choice of item to pick in each individual situation seems to be governed by prior discourse structure, not by information given in the situations themselves. In this paper we present an approach which is essentially based on dynamic semantics, but uses objects which resemble situations rather than assignments. We provide new data from definite anaphora to support the approach.

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Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995