A Treatment Of Functional Definite Descriptions

Functional anaphoric expressions are referring expressions whose references are identified with respect to references of other objects in a discourse. Among a few types of functional anaphoric expressions such as Wh expressions, definite descriptions provide a locution for functional expressions. A typical example is as follows: (1) Every book about Picasso made the author rich. In (1), 'the author' does not have its usual sense of the antecedent, such as 'an author', anywhere in the discourse. Instead, the reference of 'the author' is detomined with respect to the reference of 'book'. In other words, the description, 'author', works as a function that takes a referent for 'book' as an argument and returns a value that is the referent for 'author'. Kamp (1984) calls this kind of expressions Functional Definite Descriptions (hence, we follow him here, mid call them FDD for short, and DD for definite descriptions). In this paper, I will call 'book' a functional antecedent of FDD 'author' and its resulting anaphoric link between 'book' and 'author' a functional anaphoric link. This paper describes a classification of Functional Definite Descriptions and proposes an analysis of FDD based on a claim that FDD behave more like pronominais than definite descriptions. This paper also reports an imple-mcnu~tion of the U'eatment described here in an English text understanding system, Interprctext, at ITI J. When we process real texts, it is apparent that FDD is a non-trivial part of the use of definite descriptions. FDD constitutes a large portion of l)l) use among so-called first-mention use. In a recent study of a Swedish corpus, Fraurud (1990) reports that 60.9% of toted I)D occurrences me first-mention use, aud such complex 1)1) as the ones in the form of'the X of Y' in corresponding English structures (a typical form of Iq)D) accounts for 41.2% among the first-mention use. Since FDD can be found among simple DD, the percentage of FDD further increases. Although Fraurud's study reveals its importance in Swedish, it is easy to assume a comparable situation in English. In literature, FDD is usually regarded as a limited phenomenon that is difficult to formalize. Itowevcr, such a view toward I,Z)D is shortsighted since it not only undermines the importance of I'])D with respect to other use of DI), but also misses the important relations to functional anaphoric expressions in other categories. Hawkins (1978) studies various usage of definite de-seriptions and proposes an analysis based …