

    ABSTRACT\\

    Anaphora may link to discontinuous antecedents, as in "John found a piano
    teacher.  They are both fond of Mozart", and links from plural anaphors to
    singular antecedents in distributive contexts, as in "Every girl brought a
    cake.  Coincidentally, they were all chocolate." Despite the surface
    variation, it is argued here that a uniform account of these constructions is
    possible. An analysis of the semantic properties of discourse anaphora is
    presented here which offers a unified explanation of both the truth
    conditions and the acceptability conditions of this phenomenon. The analysis
    is framed within the context of the Discourse Representation Theory of Hans
    Kamp. In this theory, each sentence contributes to the construction of a
    representation of the meaning of the discourse. This is done in part through
    the introduction of "reference markers" for each noun phrase. Truth is
    defined for such a representation in terms of an embedding of the
    representation in a model. In this account, an anaphoric link is truthful if
    the set of individuals to which the anaphor's reference marker is mapped, is
    the same as the set of individuals to which the reference markers of the
    antecedent(s) are mapped in the course of finding an embedding for the
    representation. . This definition formalized, together with the assumptions
    that the discourse is true and that there is a principle of semantic number
    agreement, constitute the analysis presented here. In addition to the formal
    explanations, it is argued that this approach is attractive from a
    computational point of view, and an implementation of the leading ideas is
    presented.\\

    ---\\

    The term anaphor is used here in the general sense of a word which points
    back to some previous linguistic or semantic object. This differs from the
    usage within Government and Binding Theory in which the term is used more
    narrowly to refer to linguistic elements, including empty categories, which
    are necessarily bound by an antecedent according to strict syntactic
    criteria.\\

    At the discourse level, a syntactic solution does not look 
    promising because of the wide variety of surface configurations which are 
    possible, especially when plural anaphors are involved. One finds 
    straightforward links to antecedents in virtually any noun phrase position. 
    (0.1)\\ 

    a. John read a book. He liked It. \\
    b. John asked Mary about her problem. \\
       He knew It was bothering her. \\

    But in addition to these, there are links from anaphors to 
    discontinuous antecedents, as in (0.1): \\

      a. John found a piano teacher. \\
      b. They are both fond of Mozart. \\

    And there are links from plural anaphors to singular antecedents in 
    distributive contexts, as in (0.2): \\

      a. Every girl brought a cake. \\
      b. They v*re chocolate. \\
      * It was chocolate. \\

    The problem is to characterize what anaphors can be used when; given that
    structural relationships between antecedent and anaphor are not operative,
    and to specify how these anaphors are interpreted. I will concentrate
    initially on discourse anaphora involving quantified noun phrase antecedents.\\

    --1.1 Distributive contexts : Referential vs Bound anaphora--\\

    In the work on anaphora, a distinction is often drawn between what 
    is called REFERENTIAL anaphora (1.1), and BOUND anaphora (1.2): \\

      (1.1) John said that he vas sick. \\
      (1.2) Every man at the party said that he was sick. \\

    One of the alleged differences between these two is that referential 
    anaphora can occur across sentence boundaries, whereas bound anaphora, as 
    the name implies, is restricted to sentential contexts since it arises where 
    anaphoric elements are treated as variables bound by a quantifier phrase 
    within whose scope the anaphor lies. By making the natural assumption, then, 
    that quantifier scope does not ordinarily span sentence boundaries, we have an 
    account for the grammatically judgments given here for (1.3) and (1.4): \\

      (1.3) John was at the party. He was drunk. \\
      (1.4) * Every man was at the party. He was drunk. \\

    But there is another sort of anaphoric link which involves neither 
    coreference nor variable binding. This link can be illustrated by the
    following: \\

      a. Few men were at the party. \\
         They said they were drunk. \\
      b. Many men were at the party. \\
         They said they were drunk.		(1.5) \\

    Before discussing the interpretation which is of interest here, it will 
    be useful to mention a few potential sources of confusion. They have to do 
    with establishing the referent of the pronouns in these examples and in most 
    of the sentences which will be presented here. \\

    The first is the deictic use of the pronoun. Given an appropriate context,
    the first instance of "they" (we will always take the second to be bound by
    the first) may pick out something not mentioned in the discourse or may
    coincidentally pick out some set similar (or identical) to ones alluded to in
    the discourse, such as the few (many) men at the party (or some subpart of
    that group) or the many (few) men not at the party (or some subpart of that
    group), or any mixed set at all, so long as there is a sufficiently rich
    context of previous mention, shared presumptions and finger pointing.\\

    The second source of confusion relates to reference to a generic set. 
    The utterance of virtually any noun phrase makes salient the generic set 
    typically associated with the bare plural version of that noun phrase, even 
    when the original noun phrase can't be, or isn't likely to be, interpreted in a 
    generic sense. This set is available to be picked out by an anaphor with out 
    specifically being mentioned. The following cases illustrate this: \\

    a. A cat just walked into the room. \\
       They are not very shy, are they? \\
        they = cats \\
    b. The two prisoners won their suit. \\
       They'll have better conditions now. \\
         they = prisoners \\

    c. Most students are taking a gym class. \\
       They are pretty easy and it gets you around 
          the hours requirements, \\
        they — gym classes \\
       They have to take 9 hours, and this is an easy 
       way to do it. \\
        they = students 		(1.7)\\

    Because the quantifier phrase antecedents are not referring 
    expressions, it does not make sense, on the surface of it, to speak of the 
    anaphora as being preferential to their antecedents. On the other hand, the 
    assumption that this is a case of bound anaphora is equally problematic. This 
    can be seen by comparing (1.5) with their bound variable near paraphrases in \\

      a. Few men who were at the party said they were  drunk. \\
      b. Many men who were at the party said they were  drunk. \\

    There is clearly a change in meaning. Unlike the sentences in (1.7), 
    the sentences in (1.5) entail that few (many) men were at the party. Also, in 
    the sentences in (1.5), as opposed to those in (1.7), all the men who were at 
    the party claimed to be drunk. In (1.7), the relevant set of men making this 
    claim is restricted by the quantifier. There is a syntactic difference in this 
    form of anaphora as well. Normally, anaphors in English agree with their 
    antecedents with respect to number. All of the examples given thus far 
    exhibit this property. But while we found the anaphoric link in (1.4) to be 
    impossible, the discourse improves greatly when a plural anaphor is used: \\

    (1.8) Every man from our office was at the party. \\
          They were drunk. \\

    Another problem arises in cases where singular indefinite noun 
    phrases are used as antecedents. They seem to act sometimes like referential 
    noun phrases and sometimes like quantified noun phrases with respect to the 
    anaphors they take. This can be seen in the following: \\
    (1.9)  A man from our office was at the party. \\
           He was drunk. \\
    (1.10) Every woman met a man from our office at the party. \\
           * He was drunk. \\
           They were drunk. (1.11) \\

    Whatever semantic properties license the use of the plural anaphor, they
    certainly don't derive solely from the semantic properties of the antecedent
    itself, unless one is willing to tolerate a great deal of ambiguity in the
    analysis of the singular indefinite.\\

    This work is primarily concerned with providing an explanation for 
    the semantic properties associated with the type of anaphora exhibited in 
    (1.5), (1.8), and (1.11). \\

    This work is primarily concerned with providing an explanation for the
    semantic properties associated with the type of anaphora exhibited in (1.5),
    (1.8), and (1.11). It is like bound anaphora in that there is no obvious
    object which can be said to be the antecedent, but it is like referential
    anaphora in that the anaphor is a referring expression.

    }}
