Anaphora, descriptions and discourse representations

Barry Richards

doi:10.1007/BF00869392

Synthese

February 1983, Volume 54, Issue 2, pp 209–233 | Cite as

Anaphora, descriptions and discourse representations

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Barry Richards

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Discourse Representation

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Recently a view has begun to emerge that discourse might be treated modeltheoretically, perhaps by extending the concept of truth. It might be said, for example, that a discourse will be true in a model just in case all its sentences are true in the model. Hintikka & Carlson and Kamp have used this idea, more or less explicitly, as a means of resolving certain problems of inter-sentential anaphora. Some people have interpreted their attempts as leading to a new semantic notion, viz., that of a discourse model.

In this paper we propose to explore the idea of a discourse model, but not as a semantic entity. We shall consider discourse models, or rather discourse representations, as purely syntactic objects. As a consequence, our approach can be seen to be different from those of Hintikka & Carlson and Kamp. Our objective will be twofold: first, to see how discourse representations might capture the content of certain anaphoric relations; and second, to see whether discourse representations, as syntactic objects, can yield a characterization of the structure of a discourse, e.g., of its focus. Among the virtues of our syntactic treatment will be that contradictory sentences can be appropriately represented as belonging to the same discourse. Unlike the suggested model-theoretic approach, there is no presupposition that all the sentences of discourse be jointly satisfiable.

This paper is a sequel to ‘On Interpreting Pronouns’ which was first delivered to a colloquium on the philosophy of language held at Florida State University in May 1981. On that occasion Saul Kripke pursued a line of questioning which not only led to improvements in that paper but also prompted this sequel. I am grateful to Kripke for his penetrating questions, as I am to other participants of the colloquium, in particular to Jaakko and Merrill Hintikka and Paul Ziff.

The original version of the present paper was given in September 1981 at the Cleves Colloquium on Discourse Representation. I should like to express my thinks to the organizers of the conference Pieter Seuren and Peter Bosch. I should also like to thank the many participants who offered comments and criticisms, in particular Johan van Benthem, Jaakko Hintikka, Alice ter Meulen, Han Reichgelt and Pieter Seuren. Kit Fine has, as always, made it fun and illuminating to rethink my position.

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References

Donnellan, Keith: 1966, ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’,Philosophical Review 75, 281–304.Google Scholar
Evans, Gareth: 1977, ‘Pronouns, Quantifiers and Relative Clauses I’,Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7, 467–536.Google Scholar
Hintikka, Jaakko & Garlson, Lauri: 1978, ‘Conditionals, Generic Quantifiers, and Other Applications of Subgames’, in E. Saarinen (ed.),Game-Theoretical Semantics, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.Google Scholar
Kamp, Hans: 1980, ‘A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation’, manuscript, Bedford College, London.Google Scholar
Richards, Barry: 1979, ‘Pronouns, Reference and Semantic Laziness’, in J. Dancy (ed.),Papers in Language and Logic, Keele; reprinted in F. Heny (ed.),Ambiguities in Intensional Contexts, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.Google Scholar
Richards, Barry: 1982, ‘Discourse and Deixis’, to appear inJournal of Semantics 1, No. 4.Google Scholar
Richards, Barry: 1983, ‘On Interpreting Pronouns’, to appear inLinguistics and Philosophy.Google Scholar

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Barry Richards
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1.University of EdinburghUK

Anaphora, descriptions and discourse representations

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