Stressed and Unstressed Pronouns: Complementary Preferences

Abstract

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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 27, 1996
Accession Number
ADA459950

Entities

People

  • Megumi Kameyama

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  • SRI International

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  • Psychology

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  • Computational Linguistics
  • Gender and Food Studies
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