First published in 1979, this book starts from the perspective that dealing with anaphoric language can be decomposed into two complementary tasks: 1. identifying what a text potentially makes available for anaphoric reference and 2. constraining the candidate set of a given anaphoric expression down to one possible choice. The author argues there is an intimate connection between formal sentential analysis and the synthesis of an appropriate conceptual model of the discourse. Some of the issues with the creation of this conceptual model are discussed in the second chapter, which follows a background to the thesis that catalogues the types of anaphoric expression available in English and lists the types of things that can be referred to anaphorically. The third and fourth chapters examine two types of anaphoric expression that do not refer to non-linguistic entities. The final chapter details three areas into which this research could potentially be extended. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics.

Extended natural language communication between a person engaged in solving a problem or seeking information and a machine providing assistance requires the machine to be able to deal with anaphoric language in a perspicuous, transportable non-ad hoc way. This report takes the view that dealing with anaphoric language can be decomposed into two complementary tasks: (1) identifying what a text potentially makes available for anaphoric reference; and (2) constraining the candidate set of a given anaphoric expression down to one possible choice. The second task has been called the 'Anaphor resolution' problem and, to date, has stimulated much research in psychology and artificial intelligence natural language understanding. The focus of this report is the first task - that of identifying what a text makes available for anaphoric reference and how it does so.

First published in 1986, this book focuses on Anaphoric relations in the English and French languages, a phenomenon that involves a complex interaction between grammar and discourse. Studies of anaphora taking a largely ‘textual’ approach to the subject have tended to underestimate the effect upon its formation of referential and discourse factors, while studies framed within a psycholinguistic and computational perspective have been inclined to minimise the importance of the purely linguistic features connected with anaphora. This volume places the study of anaphora upon a firmer foundation by examining both its nature and functions in discourse, by pinpointing the range of factors relevant to its operation in the two languages under study, and by attempting to relate the textual and interactional perspectives within a more comprehensive framework.

Discourse anaphora is a challenging linguistic phenomenon that has given rise to research in fields as diverse as linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science. Because of the diversity of approaches these fields bring to the anaphora problem, the editors of this volume argue that there needs to be a synthesis, or at least a principled attempt to draw the differing strands of anaphora research together. The selected papers in this volume all contribute to the aim of synthesis and were selected to represent the growing importance of corpus-based and computational approaches to anaphora description, and to developing natural language systems for resolving anaphora in natural language.

This volume contains a careful selection of papers concerned with actual research questions on anaphoric reference, a subject of current interest with various linguistic subdisciplines. This is reflected in this book as it methodically covers broadly invested approaches from cognitive, neurolinguistic, formal and computational perspectives, each contribution representing the respective 'state of the art' on a high theoretical and empirical level. The volume contains three thematic parts: Anaphors in Cognitive, Text- and Discourse Linguistics; The Syntax and Semantics of Anaphors; and Neurolinguistic Studies on the reception of anaphoric reference. The contributions investigate several Indo-European languages.

Abstract: "This thesis is concerned with the formal semantic analysis of discourse and anaphora. A formal model-theoretic semantic framework, Graph-Theoretic Semantics (GTS), is developed covering simple extensional English discourse involving singular and plural noun phrase anaphora. In opposition to previous theories of discourse anaphora, (such as Kamp's DRT or Groenendijk and Stokhof's DPL) anaphoric antecedent information is stored and manipulated within the denotational space. Graph-theoretic denotations are utilized for this purpose. Graph vertices describe individuals identified by the interpretation of a discourse. Graph edges describe constraints amongst the individuals described by the graph vertices. The GTS framework treats these denotation graphs as constraint networks in order to correctly handle the various anaphor- antecedent relations that have been proposed within the literature. The framework is best viewed as a theory of anaphoric analysis. That is, the framework determines how, in certain discourses, appropriate information for anaphoric reference can be derived and, given particular references, how appropriate interpretations can be provided. The framework does not impose a particular set of constraints on anaphoric reference. However, it does provide through the representational and denotational domains the means for providing appropriate constraints on anaphoric reference to allow for the development of particular theories of anaphoric reference. Some example theories of anaphoric reference are provided. As well as providing a formally precise semantic framework, attention has been paid to theoretical and practical computational issues. The semantic representation is described with unification feature-structures, providing a flexible, powerful and extensible representational foundation for the semantic interpretation. The construction of appropriate semantic representations from an example grammar is illustrated within the PATR unification grammar formalism. The denotational description of language as graphs which are treated as constraint networks allows the extensive research into the efficient solution of constraint satisfaction problems to be utilized. An implementation of the framework is provided."

In The Dynamics of Meaning, Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface.