Stressed and Unstressed Pronouns: Complementary Preferences

Abstract : I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun from that of an unstressed pronoun in the same discourse position. The base preference must be computed in a total pragmatics module including commonsense preferences. The focus constraint in Rooth's theory of semantic focus is interpreted to be the salient subset of the domain in the local attentional state in the discourse context independently motivated for other purposes in Centering Theory.

[1]  Scott Weinstein,et al.  Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse , 1995, CL.

[2]  Jeanette K. Gundel,et al.  Cognitive Status and the Form of Referring Expressions in Discourse , 1993 .

[3]  Petr Sgall,et al.  The Meaning Of The Sentence In Its Semantic And Pragmatic Aspects , 1986 .

[4]  Aravind K. Joshi,et al.  Centered Logic: The Role of Entity Centered Sentence Representation in Natural Language Inferencing , 1979, IJCAI.

[5]  Andrew Kehler,et al.  The Effect of Establishing Coherence in Ellipsis and Anaphora Resolution , 1993, ACL.

[6]  Massimo Poesio,et al.  Temporal Centering , 1993, ACL.

[7]  Scott Prevost.  An Information Structural Approach to Spoken Language Generation , 1996, ACL.

[8]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Focusing in the comprehension of definite anaphora , 1986 .

[9]  Ellen F. Prince,et al.  Toward a taxonomy of given-new information , 1981 .

[10]  Barbara J. Grosz,et al.  The representation and use of focus in dialogue understanding. , 1977 .

[11]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Towards a computational theory of definite anaphora comprehension in English discourse , 1979 .

[12]  Mats Rooth.  A theory of focus interpretation , 1992, Natural Language Semantics.

[13]  Barbara J. Grosz,et al.  Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues , 1979 .

[14]  Scott Weinstein,et al.  Providing a Unified Account of Definite Noun Phrases in Discourse , 1983, ACL.

[15]  Megumi Kameyama,et al.  A Property-Sharing Constraint in Centering , 1986, ACL.

[16]  Carl Pollard,et al.  A Centering Approach to Pronouns , 1987, ACL.

[17]  Peter Bosch,et al.  Representing and accessing focussed referents , 1988 .

[19]  Peter Bosch,et al.  Focus and Natural Language Processing , 1995 .

[20]  Josef Vachek,et al.  Β. FUNCTIONAL SYNTAX , 1975 .

[21]  Megumi Kameyama,et al.  Indefeasible Semantics and Defeasible Pragmatics , 1994, ArXiv.

[22]  Megumi Kameyama,et al.  Zero anaphora: The case of Japanese , 1990 .

[23]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Accent and bound anaphora , 1991 .

[24]  L SidnerCandace,et al.  Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse , 1986 .

[25]  Scott Weinstein,et al.  Control of Inference: Role of Some Aspects of Discourse Structure-Centering , 1981, IJCAI.

[26]  Leon A. Jakobovits,et al.  Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology , 1971 .

[27]  G. Lakoff.  Pronouns and Reference , 1968 .