Stressed and Unstressed Pronouns: Complementary Preferences
Abstract
Description
I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun from that of an unstressed pronoun in the same discourse position. The base preference must be computed in a total pragmatics module including commonsense preferences. The focus constraint in Rooth's theory of semantic focus is interpreted to be the salient subset of the domain in the local attentional state in the discourse context independently motivated for other purposes in Centering Theory.
Uses endnotes.sty and lingmacros.sty. To appear in Bosch, Peter and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. (This is an extended and revised version of the paper with the same title in Bosch, Peter and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus and Natural Language Processing, Institute for Logic and Linguistics, IBM, Heidelberg, 1994, 475-484.)
Uses endnotes.sty and lingmacros.sty. To appear in Bosch, Peter and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. (This is an extended and revised version of the paper with the same title in Bosch, Peter and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus and Natural Language Processing, Institute for Logic and Linguistics, IBM, Heidelberg, 1994, 475-484.)