A squib on anaphora and coindexing
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A squib on anaphora and coindexing Reinhard Muskens
Published online: 16 July 2011 Ó The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract There are two kinds of semantic theories of anaphora. Some, such as Heim’s File Change Semantics, Groenendijk and Stokhof’s Dynamic Predicate Logic, or Muskens’ Compositional DRT (CDRT), seem to require full coindexing of anaphora and their antecedents prior to interpretation. Others, such as Kamp’s Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), do not require this coindexing and seem to have an important advantage here. In this squib I will sketch a procedure that the first group of theories may help themselves to so that they can interleave interpretation and coindexing in DRT’s way. Keywords
Dynamic semantics Anaphora Coindexing
1 Introduction Dynamic theories of context change and anaphora come in two flavours. Some require all input to the semantic component to come with a full coindexing of anaphoric elements and their antecedents and some do not. The second category is exemplified by Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, Kamp and Reyle 1993), which considers anaphora resolution to be an integral part of semantics, while the first category includes Heim’s (1982) File Change Semantics, Groenendijk and Stokhof’s (1991) Dynamic Predicate Logic and my own Compositional DRT (CDRT, Muskens 1996). It seems that DRT has the advantage here, as its resolutionon-the-fly perspective is computationally attractive and far more plausible than the
R. Muskens (&) Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University, 5037 AB, Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
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coindex-first idea. But resolution-on-the-fly is available to the other theories as well, as I will argue here.
2 Interleaving interpretation and coindexing Let us start by drawing a distinction between the declarative and the algorithmic aspects of any linguistic theory. More often than not a linguist can concentrate on the former, leaving procedural and performative aspects out of consideration. Those interested in characterising aspects of Universal Grammar, for example, typically will not focus on performance related matters and many who are working in a framework such as LFG or HPSG will be happy to specify a class of well-formed expressions without bothering to give a corresponding algorithm for parsing or generation. Showing that such algorithms exist and investigating their properties can often be left to the computationally oriented. A grammar can be completely independent from any algorithm realising it. In semantics there is a similar analytic distinction between specifying a relation between form and meaning and giving an interpretation procedure, i.e. an algorithm that yields a meaning representation when given a linguistic form. DRT gives specification and procedure in one combined theory, but the other theories mentioned above are best interpreted as only giving a specification. How they can be provided with a computationally plausible procedural comp
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