ANAPHORA, ANTECEDENTS, AND ACCESSIBILITY

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the notion of accessibility in dynamic semantics and develop a refinement of the accessibility relation, which pays special attention to the description expressed in the anaphoric expression and the progression in a discourse. Anaphoric expressions are interpreted as referring to the most-accessible item of their kind. I employ choice functions as the formal means to represent this accessibility relation. Choice functions are functions that assign to a set one of its elements. This element represents the most-accessible of its kind in a particular discourse. Linguistic expressions do not only depend in their interpretation on the accessibility structure of a discourse, they also change this structure. The referent of an indefinite NP becomes the most-accessible item of its kind. This change of the accessibility is modeled by updates of choice functions at an additional level of meaning. It will be shown that this extended formalism yields not only a more adequate representation of discourses, but also solves the problem of how to establish anaphoric links and supplies a uniform representation of definite and indefinite expressions with respect to their potential to change the accessibility structure of the discourse.