Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse

Abstract

Linguistic theories typically assign various linguistic phenomena to one of the categories, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic, as if the phenomena in each category were relatively independent of those in the others. However, various phenomena in discourse do not seem to yield comfortably to any account that is strictly a syntactic or semantic or pragmatic one. This paper focuses on particular phenomena of this sort-the use of various referring expressions such as definite noun phrases and pronouns-and examines their interaction with mechanisms used to maintain discourse coherence.