Integrating Situations into a Theory of Discourse Anaphora

1 This paper provides an account of deenite and pronominal anaphora which draws together insights from dynamic semantics and situation semantics. The result is a dynamic semantics in which contexts consist of the parts of a scenario which have been brought to a hearer's attention. The contexts are structured by meta-level disjunction, corresponding to a set of situations where one is in attention but the hearer doesn't know which one, and meta-level conjunction corresponding to a set of situations which are simultaneously in attention. Data from bridging reference, disjunction, and telescoping is used to motivate the account, together with some of the data which has been used in the past to argue for and against situation based accounts of anaphora. 1 Theories of Discourse Anaphora It is useful to separate out three treatments of anaphora. The rst, and most traditional approach is to try to ll in the anaphor, either at the level of word string, syntax, or semantic representation. For pronominal anaphora almost all recent proposals have been at the level of semantic representation. Perhaps the most sophisticated approach is the E-type approach (original work by Evans 1980, but see e.g. Does 1994 for recent developments). Consider the following discourse. (1) A young child came in today. He sat down at the computer and started typing. The E-type approach makes the second sentence less context dependent by replacing He by a representation equivalent to The young child who came in today. There has been much valuable, but perhaps inconclusive, discussion of whether an E-type approach, in treating pronouns similar to deenites, requires that the description must refer uniquely and whether or not that is problematic (e. A rather diierent issue concerns the treatment of mutually dependent anaphora. Consider the discourses: (2) a. A colleague of mine looked after a baby last week. After 5 minutes it had driven him crazy. b. A girlfriend of a colleague of mine is a journalist. She tells him all the latest Royal gossip. In (a), it refers to a baby looked after by a colleague, him to a colleague who looked after that baby. In E-type approaches we get an interpretation along the lines of: (3) After 5 minutes the baby who was looked after by a colleague of mine last week drove the colleague of mine who looked after a baby last week crazy. For (b) we would need an interpretation along …