The transitivity of de jure coreference: a case against Pinillos
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The transitivity of de jure coreference: a case against Pinillos Chulmin Yoon1
Accepted: 13 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract De jure coreference in a discourse is typically understood as explicit coreference that speakers are required to recognize in order to count as having correctly understood the discourse. For example, in an utterance of the sentence ‘Tom went to the market because he needed soy milk’, the two underlined terms are typically coreferential in a way that appreciating their coreference is required to fully understand the utterance. Often, de jure coreference is understood as an equivalence relation, so in particular it is thought of as a transitive relation. However, Pinillos (Philos Stud 154(2):301–324, 2011) provides examples that apparently challenge the transitivity of de jure coreference (in intra-personal cases). In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, while it is (at best) inconclusive whether the relevant terms in Pinillos’s examples satisfy his third condition, it is much clearer that they fail to satisfy his first two conditions. Given that Pinillos’s conditions capture important characteristics of de jure coreference, his examples do not successfully show the non-transitivity of de jure coreference. Second, I present an alternative account of his examples, one that shows which representation the anaphoric pronoun in an example of the sort that he presents is de jure coreferential with. Keywords Coreference De jure coreference Semantic relationism Transitivity
& Chulmin Yoon [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
123
C. Yoon
1 Introduction De jure coreference in a discourse is typically understood as explicit coreference that speakers are required to recognize in order to count as having correctly understood the discourse. For example, in an utterance of the sentence ‘Tom went to the market because he needed soy milk’, the two underlined terms are typically coreferential in a way that appreciating their coreference is required to fully understand the utterance. Often, de jure coreference is understood as an equivalence relation, so in particular it is thought of as a transitive relation. However, Pinillos (2011) provides examples that apparently challenge the transitivity of de jure coreference (in intra-personal cases). In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, while it is (at best) inconclusive whether the relevant terms in Pinillos’s examples satisfy his third condition, it is much clearer that they fail to satisfy his first two conditions. Given that Pinillos’s conditions capture important characteristics of de jure coreference, his examples do not successfully show the non-transitivity of de jure coreference. Second, I present an alternative account of his examples, one that shows which representation the anaphoric pronoun in an example of the sort that he presents is de jure coreferential with. The structure of this paper is as follows. In Sect. 2, I further explicate the notion of de jure
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