No abstract

In this chapter a case is made for six implicationally related cognitive statuses relevant for explicating the use of referring expressions in natural language discourse. These statuses are the conventional meanings signaled by determiners and pronouns, and interaction of the statuses with general conversational principles such as Grice’s Maxim of Quantity accounts for the actual distribution and interpretation of forms when necessary conditions for the use of more than one form are met. This proposal is supported by an empirical study of the distribution of referring expressions in naturally occurring discourse in five languages: English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.

Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993), lexical items included in referring forms are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker's intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee, the latter encoded by various determiners and pronouns. This article focuses on effects of underspecification of cognitive status, establishing that, although salience and accessibility play an important role in reference processing, the Givenness Hierarchy itself is not a hierarchy of degrees of salience ⁄ accessibility, contrary to what has often been assumed. We thus show that the framework is able to account for a number of experimental results in the literature without making additional assumptions about form-specific constraints associated with different referring forms.

This paper presents necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of demonstrative expressions in English and discusses implications for current discourse processing algorithms. We examine a broad range of texts to show how the distribution of demonstrative forms and functions is genre dependent. This research is part of a larger study of anaphoric expressions, the results of which will be incorporated into a natural language generation system.

A commonly held view of English definite articles is that they signal that the referent of an NP is familiar to the addressee. However, it is well known that not all definite article phrases meet this familiarity requirement. To account for such non-familiar uses, Heim (1982) invokes the mechanism of 'accommodation', which enables an addressee to remedy a violation of the familiarity requirement by adding assumptions to the 'common ground'. In this paper we argue that the Givenness Hierarchy framework provides an insightful account of all uses of definite article phrases without requiring an appeal to accommodation. Such an account provides a unified treatment of definite article phrases, including demonstrative phrases and personal pronouns, while at the same time distinguishing among them in a principled way. This proposal is supported by results of a corpus-based examination of the use of definite articles and by an examination of cleft presuppositions. *