Approaches To Japanese Zero Pronouns: Centering And Relevance

Accessibility of candidate referents is a crucial factor in successful reference assignment and this intuition has been adequately accommodated and developed in centering theory. By contrast, another equally important factor involved in reference assignment, namely, accessibili ty of contextual assumptions, seems to have not been addressed fully as a part of a computational theory of reference. In the field of pragmatics, however, the role of context has always been one of the central issues and the recent approach to context selection based on the notion of relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995) seems to be currently the most promising. In this paper, I will review and assess the recent centering approach to the interpretation of Japanese zero pronouns (Walker et al. 1994) as a case study, and suggest that relevance theory can provide one way of complementing it. In order •to incorporate a needed mechanism of contextual selection into a model of reference assignment, model builders must take into account the heater's ability to anticipate certain cognitive effects that may be achieved by upcoming utterances. It is my hope that this paper will lead to a fruitful discussion of finding possible ways of using Sperber & Wilson-'s notion of relevance in practical applications.