Deixis, binding and presupposition

Dynamic semantic accounts of presupposition have proven to quite successful improvements over earlier theories. One great advance has been to link presupposition and anaphora together (van der Sandt 92, Geurts 95), an approach that extends to integrate bridging and other discourse phenomena (Asher and Lascarides 1998a,b). In this extended anaphoric account, presuppositions attach, like assertions, to the discourse context via certain rhetorical relations. These discourse attachments constrain accommodation and help avoid some infelicitous predictions of standard accounts of presupposition. Further, they have interesting and complex interactions with underspecified conditions that are an important feature of the contributions of most presupposition triggers. Deictic uses of definites, on the other hand, seem at first glance to fall outside the purview of an anaphoric theory of presupposition. There seems to be little that a discourse based theory would have to say. I will argue, however, that a discourse based account can capture how these definites function in conversation. In particular such accounts can clarify the interaction between the uses of such deictic definites and various conversational moves. At least some deictic uses of definites generate presuppositions that are bound to the context via a rhetorical function that I'll call unchoring, which if successful entails a type of knowing how. If this anchoring function is accepted, then the acceptors know how to locate the referent of the definite in the present context. I'll concentrate here just on definites that refer to spatial locations, where the intuitions about anchoring are quite clear. But I think that this view extends to other deictic uses of definites and has ramifications for an analysis of de re attitudes as well

Inconsistent use of gesture space during abstract pointing impairs language comprehension

Pointing toward concrete objects is a well-known and efficient communicative strategy. Much less is known about the communicative effectiveness of abstract pointing where the pointing gestures are directed to “empty space.” McNeill's (2003) observations suggest that abstract pointing can be used to establish referents in gesture space, without the referents being physically present. Recently, however, it has been shown that abstract pointing typically provides redundant information to the uttered speech thereby suggesting a very limited communicative value (So et al., 2009). In a first approach to tackle this issue we were interested to know whether perceivers are sensitive at all to this gesture cue or whether it is completely discarded as irrelevant add-on information. Sensitivity to for instance a gesture-speech mismatch would suggest a potential communicative function of abstract pointing. Therefore, we devised a mismatch paradigm in which participants watched a video where a female was interviewed on various topics. During her responses, she established two concepts in space using abstract pointing (e.g., pointing to the left when saying Donald, and pointing to the right when saying Mickey). In the last response to each topic, the pointing gesture accompanying a target word (e.g., Donald) was either consistent or inconsistent with the previously established location. Event related brain potentials showed an increased N400 and P600 when gesture and speech referred to different referents, indicating that inconsistent use of gesture space impairs language comprehension. Abstract pointing was found to influence comprehension even though gesture was not crucial to understanding the sentences or conducting the experimental task. These data suggest that a referent was retrieved via abstract pointing and that abstract pointing can potentially be used for referent indication in a discourse. We conclude that abstract pointing has a potential communicative function

Information structure and the accessibility of clausally introduced referents

This paper will examine the role of various factors in affecting the salience, and hence the accessibility to pronominal reference, of entities introduced into a discourse by a full clause. We begin with the premise that the possibility of pronominal reference with it versus that depends on the cognitive status of the referent, in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). This formulation of the problem provides grounds for an explanation of the data presented above, and provides a framework within which we examine the role of various other factors in promoting the salience of a clausally introduced entity, including the information structure of the utterance in which the entity is introduced. For entities introduced by clausal complements to bridge verbs, we show that the information structure of the utterance introducing the entity has a partial, or one-sided, effect on the salience of the entity. When the complement clause is focal, the salience of the entity depends only on its referential givenness-newness (in the sense of Gundel 1988, 1999b), as we would expect. But when the complement clause is ground material, the salience of an entity introduced by the clause is enhanced. Other factors, including the presuppositionality of factive and interrogative complements, also serve to enhance the salience of entities introduced by complement clauses

Reliable Words Third Person Pronouns in Indonesian News Reports

This article examines uses of Indonesian third person singular pronouns ia and dia in news reports. It takes as its departure point the general account of the pronouns which specifies that ia can occur only in subject position, while dia can occur in subject or object position. The article shows that, although both pronouns can occur in subject position, they differ distributionally and functionally. Ia occurs almost three times as frequently as dia and predominates in subject position, while dia occurs mostly in non-subject position. Ia is primarily used to convey the notion that the referent is a reliable and authoritative source of information and to focus on the referent as an agent or protagonist who is initiating or performing some action or a series of actions. By contrast, dia tends to be selected for contexts in which the referent is presented as a speaker who is elaborating on what has been said previously rather than introducing a new point. The predominance of ia in news report accords with its characterization as a pronoun strongly associated with formal registers

Mimesis and Metaphor

"Representation", "imitation" and "mirroring" have proved to be insufficient translations of the concept of mimesis. Walter Benjamin's notion of "mimetic potential" offers a different view on the qualities of mimesis. Benjamin stresses the importance of language and its mediality to mimesis; for him language is the "höchste Stufe des mimetischen Verhaltens und das vollkommenste Archiv der unsinnlichen Ähnlichkeit" (Benjamin 1991, Bd. II/1, 213) He considers mimesis on the level of linguistic mediality. In the following I will try to outline the mimetic potential of metaphors in literary texts which focus on their linguistic mediality. As Paul Ricoeur suggests, "the possibility that metaphorical discourse says something about reality collides with the apparent constitution of poetic discourse, which seems to be essentially non-referential and centred on itself. To this non-referential conception of poetic discourse I oppose the idea that the suspension of literal reference is the condition for the release of a power of second-degree reference which is properly poetic reference. Thus, to use an expression borrowed from Jakobson, one must not speak only of split sense but of 'split reference' as well." (Ricoeur 1977, 6

Evaluating Centering for Information Ordering Using Corpora

In this article we discuss several metrics of coherence defined using centering theory and investigate the usefulness of such metrics for information ordering in automatic text generation. We estimate empirically which is the most promising metric and how useful this metric is using a general methodology applied on several corpora. Our main result is that the simplest metric (which relies exclusively on NOCB transitions) sets a robust baseline that cannot be outperformed by other metrics which make use of additional centering-based features. This baseline can be used for the development of both text-to-text and concept-to-text generation systems. </jats:p