Remarks On Plural Anaphora

The interpretation of plural anaphora often requires the construction of complex reference objects (RefOs) out of RefOs which were formerly introduced not by plural terms but by a number of singular terms only. Often, several complex RefOs can be constructed, but only one of them is the preferred referent for the plural anaphor in question. As a means of explanation for preferred and non-preferred interpretations of plural anaphora, the concept of a Common Association Basis (CAB) for the potential atomic parts of a complex object is introduced in the following. CABs pose conceptual constraints on the formation of complex RefOs in general. We argue that in cases where a suitable CAB for the atomic RefOs introduced in the text exists, the corresponding complex RefO is constructed as early as in the course of processing the antecedent sentence and put into the focus domain of the discourse model. Thus, the search for a referent for a plural anaphor is constrained to a limited domain of RefOs according to the general principles of focus theory in NLP. Further principles of interpretation are suggested which guide the resolution of plural anaphora in cases where more than one suitable complex RefO is in focus. * The research on this paper was supported in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant Ha 1237/2-1. GAP is the acronym for "Gruppierungsund Abgrenzungsgrozesse beim Aufbau sprachlich angeregter mentaler Modelle" (Processes of grouping and separation in the construction of mental models from texts), a research project carried out in the DFG-program "Kognitive Linguistik". 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N Most approaches to processing anaphora concern themselves mainly with the case of singulars and deal only peripherally with the complications of plurals. An analysis of plural anaphora should answer the following additional questions: 1) How are the referents of plural terms represented by discourse entities (internal proxies)? 2) How is the link between plural anaphora and suitable antecedent discourse entities established? 3) How are complex discourse entities constructed from atomic ones? 4) When are complex discourse entities constructed in the process of text comprehension? The present paper addresses primarily the third and fourth questions. However, we will give some sketchy answers to the first and second questions as well. We consider only two-sentence texts in which the second sentence contains an anaphoric pronoun that refers to entities introduced in the first sentence by various constructions: (1) a. The children were at the cinema. They had a great time. b. Michael and Maria were at the cinema. They had a great time. c. Michael was at the cinema with Maria. They had a great time. d. Michael met Maria at the cinema. They had a great time. The question is: To which entities, i.e. complex discourse entities, does the plural anaphor th_h~ refer? Surely in (1.a) to the one corresponding to the children, and in (1.b), (1.c) and (1.d) to Michael and Maria. Up to now, most analyses of plural anaphora