Bridging

In this paper, we offer a novel method for processing given information in discourse, paying particular attention to definite descriptions. We argue that extant theories don’t do justice to the complexity of interaction between the knowledge resources that are used. In line with Hobbs (1979), we claim that discourse structure—as defined by the rhetorical connections between the propositions introduced in the text—is an important source of knowledge for processing given information, because rhetorical relations can change the semantic content of it. We model the processing of given information as a byproduct of computing rhetorical structure in a framework known as SDRT (Asher, 1993), which formalises the interaction between discourse structure and compositional and lexical semantics in determining semantic content. We demonstrate that it provides a richer, more accurate interpretation of definite descriptions than has been offered so far.