Anaphora without indices: Dynamics of centering

Abstract

The standard way to represent anaphoric dependencies is to co-index the anaphor with its antecedent in the syntactic input to semantic rules, which then interpret such indices as variables. Dynamic theories (e.g. Kamp’s DRT, Heim’s File Change Semantics, Muskens’s Compositional DRT, etc) combine syntactic co-indexation with semantic left-to-right asymmetry. This captures the fact that the anaphor gets its referent from the antecedent and not vice versa. Formally, a text updates the input state of information to the output state. In particular, an indexed antecedent updates the entity assigned to its index, and the output entity is then picked up as the referent by any subsequent co-indexed anaphor.

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2011-04-25

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Maria Bittner
Rutgers University, New Brunswick

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References found in this work

Defaults in update semantics.Frank Veltman - 1996 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 25 (3):221 - 261.
Coherence and Coreference.Jerry R. Hobbs - 1979 - Cognitive Science 3 (1):67-90.
Time and modality without tenses or modals.Maria Bittner - 2011 - In Renate Musan & Monika Rathert (eds.), Tense across Languages. Niemeyer. pp. 147--188.

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