Coreference without Discourse Referents : A non-representational DRT-like discourse semantics

Abstract

We propose a non-representational, compositional treatment of anaphora. By nonrepresentational we mean working directly with denotations without relying on specific features of a representational language, such as discourse referents. The approach is based on an adapted version of the montagovian theory of generalized quantifiers. Furthermore we use a language abstraction borrowed from programming language semantics to enforce a specific order of evaluation for the interpretations. This allows us to reproduce the sequential dynamics of anaphora. We present a complete formalization of our theory that can be easily implemented in a functional computational paradigm. In the end we discuss limitations of our approach and present preliminary solutions.