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Notes on Plural Reference and the Scenario-Mapping Principle in Comprehension

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Focus and Coherence in Discourse Processing
This chapter is in the book Focus and Coherence in Discourse Processing
A. J. SANFORD and L. Μ. MOXEY Notes on Plural Reference and the Scenario-Mapping Principle in Comprehension"' 1. The basic problem While much research into singular anaphora has been carried out in the disci-plines of cognitive science, rather less work has been carried out on plural ana-phora. A particularly tricky problem is the case of split antecedents, where two or more antecedents are introduced separately, but are subsequently referred to together by means of a plural pronoun. The problem is difficult, because as (1-4) show, singular and plural reference may sometimes be equally possible: (1) John and Mary took the train to town. (2) He wanted to buy some new clothes. (3) She wanted to buy some new clothes. (4) They wanted to buy some new clothes. The general problem is to determine under what conditions it is or is not possible to use plural and singular references. Not all examples allow both sorts of reference to be made with equal ease, as we shall see. Also, there is a specific problem of how plurals might get represented within the focussed memory theory of Sanford and Garrod (1981). We shall begin with a sketch of the scena-rio-mapping account of text comprehension. 1.1 Scenario-mapping as a basis of comprehension Schema-based theories of text comprehension are based on the idea that a text serves to identify situational descriptions in memory of which the discourse is a partial description. New facts, derived from the discourse, are then interpreted with respect to the current situational description. If a suitable situational de-scription is known, then new information merely adds to or modifies the infor-mation in the situational description. This continues until signals within the text lead to a new situational model being identified. Such theories have been sug-gested in AI (Schänk and Abelson's script account, 1977), and in psychology This research was initiated under ESRC research grant number R0002315592 awarded to the first author, and was stimulated by ZIF seminars at The University of Bielefeld organised by Gert Rickheit and Christopher Habel. We are grateful to Joy Aked, Maria Eschenbach, Kari Fraurud, Simon Garrod, Fiona Lockhart, Klaus Rehkämper, and Keith Stenning and for comments.

A. J. SANFORD and L. Μ. MOXEY Notes on Plural Reference and the Scenario-Mapping Principle in Comprehension"' 1. The basic problem While much research into singular anaphora has been carried out in the disci-plines of cognitive science, rather less work has been carried out on plural ana-phora. A particularly tricky problem is the case of split antecedents, where two or more antecedents are introduced separately, but are subsequently referred to together by means of a plural pronoun. The problem is difficult, because as (1-4) show, singular and plural reference may sometimes be equally possible: (1) John and Mary took the train to town. (2) He wanted to buy some new clothes. (3) She wanted to buy some new clothes. (4) They wanted to buy some new clothes. The general problem is to determine under what conditions it is or is not possible to use plural and singular references. Not all examples allow both sorts of reference to be made with equal ease, as we shall see. Also, there is a specific problem of how plurals might get represented within the focussed memory theory of Sanford and Garrod (1981). We shall begin with a sketch of the scena-rio-mapping account of text comprehension. 1.1 Scenario-mapping as a basis of comprehension Schema-based theories of text comprehension are based on the idea that a text serves to identify situational descriptions in memory of which the discourse is a partial description. New facts, derived from the discourse, are then interpreted with respect to the current situational description. If a suitable situational de-scription is known, then new information merely adds to or modifies the infor-mation in the situational description. This continues until signals within the text lead to a new situational model being identified. Such theories have been sug-gested in AI (Schänk and Abelson's script account, 1977), and in psychology This research was initiated under ESRC research grant number R0002315592 awarded to the first author, and was stimulated by ZIF seminars at The University of Bielefeld organised by Gert Rickheit and Christopher Habel. We are grateful to Joy Aked, Maria Eschenbach, Kari Fraurud, Simon Garrod, Fiona Lockhart, Klaus Rehkämper, and Keith Stenning and for comments.

Chapters in this book

  1. I-IV I
  2. Contents V
  3. Introduction VII
  4. Part I: Focus
  5. Distinguishing between Explicit and Implicit Focus during Text Comprehension 3
  6. Notes on Plural Reference and the Scenario-Mapping Principle in Comprehension 18
  7. Focussing in Spatial Mental Models 35
  8. Focussing and the Process of Pronominal Resolution 53
  9. Focussing on the Use of German beide 75
  10. Part II: Coherence
  11. Special Determinants of Coherence in Spoken Dialogue 97
  12. Coherence Regained 115
  13. Comprehension Processes as a Means for Text Generation 143
  14. Economical Principles in Coherence Management: A Cognitive Systems Approach 170
  15. The Notion of Coherence in Discourse 190
  16. Cohesion Processes, Coherence, and Anomaly Detection 203
  17. Distributed Text Structure Parsing - Computing Thematic Progressions in Expository Texts 214
  18. Causality in Discourse 251
  19. Focus and Anaphora. A Selected Bibliography (1985-1993) 261
  20. Subject Index 299
  21. 301-304 301
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110808414.18

Chapters in this book

  1. I-IV I
  2. Contents V
  3. Introduction VII
  4. Part I: Focus
  5. Distinguishing between Explicit and Implicit Focus during Text Comprehension 3
  6. Notes on Plural Reference and the Scenario-Mapping Principle in Comprehension 18
  7. Focussing in Spatial Mental Models 35
  8. Focussing and the Process of Pronominal Resolution 53
  9. Focussing on the Use of German beide 75
  10. Part II: Coherence
  11. Special Determinants of Coherence in Spoken Dialogue 97
  12. Coherence Regained 115
  13. Comprehension Processes as a Means for Text Generation 143
  14. Economical Principles in Coherence Management: A Cognitive Systems Approach 170
  15. The Notion of Coherence in Discourse 190
  16. Cohesion Processes, Coherence, and Anomaly Detection 203
  17. Distributed Text Structure Parsing - Computing Thematic Progressions in Expository Texts 214
  18. Causality in Discourse 251
  19. Focus and Anaphora. A Selected Bibliography (1985-1993) 261
  20. Subject Index 299
  21. 301-304 301
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