Bound Variables and Other Anaphors

When a noun phrase or a pronoun occurs in a sentence, i t is frequently appropriate to ask what ent i ty i t refers to, but i t is well known that not all uses of noun phrases and pronouns are referential in this simple sense. In computational approaches to language processing, I believe the main thrust in this area has been toward understanding those referential uses of NP's and pronouns which require the use of both linguist ic and non-linguistic inferences to determine the most plausible referent for the expression. My emphasis in this paper wi l l be somewhat di f ferent. I believe that recent work by l inguists, logicians, and philosophers is leading to convergence on the view that there are two fundamenta l ly dist inct uses of pronouns which have to be treated quite separately: ( i ) a use that corresponds to the logician's use of bound variables, and ( i i ) a use which I wi l l cal l , for want of"a better name, a pragmatic use. I t can be argued that bound variable pronouns are restricted to occurrences in syntactic construction with their antecedents, and are fu l l y interpreted at the level of semantics, while pragmatic pronouns need not have l inguist ic antecedents at a l l , and require pragmatics as well as semantics for their interpretation.