Centering Suburbia

Retrofitting suburbia: Is the compact city feasible?

Functional Centering

Based on empirical evidence from a free word order language (German) we propose a fundamental revision of the principles guiding the ordering of discourse entities in the forward-looking centers within the centering model. We claim that grammatical role criteria should be replaced by indicators of the functional information structure of the utterances, i.e., the distinction between context-boun...

Dynamic Centering

Temporal Centering

We present a semantic and pragmatic account of the anaphoric properties of past and perfect that improves on previous work by integrating discourse structure, aspectual type, surface structure and commonsense knowledge. A novel aspect of our account is that we distinguish between two kinds of temporal intervals in the interpretation of temporal operators-discourse reference intervals and event ...

Tense, Mood, and Centering

I propose that tense and mood paradigms are grammatical centering systems. Specifically, English tenses form a temporal centering system, which monitors and updates topic times, whereas Kalaallisut moods form a modal centering system, which monitors and updates modal discourse referents. Nevertheless, English and Kalaallisut translation equivalents converge on the same truth conditions, due to ...