Restrictive modification on descriptions

This paper presents the results of a corpus study which reveals the frequency of restrictive post-modification on definite descriptions in English language texts (newspaper articles). It shows that restricted descriptions are usually first mention uses (nonanaphoric) and that these can be systematically identified. The paper then compares features of restricted descriptions with bridging references, with respect to the relation existing between triggers/anchors and their associates. 1 Different uses of definite descriptions The use of definite descriptions (DDs) occurring in written texts that is most commonly discussed in the literature is the case in which a definite description picks up a referent introduced in a previous discourse. Less attention is devoted to definites whose interpretation depends on knowledge about the existence of certain referents, such as the cricket World Cup finals. Even more neglected are DDs which in fact introduce a novel referent to the discourse on the basis of information available in the referring act itself, for instance, the arguments for a ban on the use of private handguns. In order to draw a clearer picture of the problem the analysis of a selection of parsed newspaper articles from the Penn Treebank Corpus (Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz, 1993) was undertaken. It was verified that the cases mentioned above are in fact extensively used in the type of texts treated. Different uses of descriptions in the corpus were classified according to a taxonomy based on (Hawkins, 1978). This classification was the basis for development and evaluation of a Prolog system which resolves anaphoric definite descriptions and also takes into account first mention uses, as presented in (Vieira and Poesio, 1996). A brief description and exemplification of the 4 classes which were considered relevant to the purposes of this work follows: Anaphoric same head: an antecedent is given explicitly in the text and by means of a same head noun, as in a house ... the house Associative: an associated antecedent is given in the text, some form of reasoning is required for its identification. Examples are something has changed ... the change; a home ... the house; a house ... the door; Kadane Co. ... the company. Larger Situation or Unfamiliar:1 no antecedent is provided by the text. Larger Situation: the description is a proper noun, as in the White House (first occurrence) ; the Iran-Iraq war or refers to something of common knowledge, for instance the third quarter ; the nation. Unfamiliar: the interpretation of the description is based on additional information attached to the definite NP, such as relative clauses, the woman he likes; associative clauses, the door of the house; NP complements the fact that; unexplanatory modifiers, the first, the best, the highest, the tallest ...; apposition, James Dean, the actor; or copular construction. the actor is James Dean. Idiom: idiomatic expressions or metaphoric uses of DDs, as in It went back into the soup The results of the analysis of the corpus (20 articles from the Wall Street Journal ) and the system’s results are summarised in table 1. 1For the purposes of the present discussion (restrictive modification), this classification, ideally, would have to separate larger situation and unfamiliar uses in two distinct classes, future work will be done in this direction.