The semantics of provisional, temporal anaphors and cataphors Daniel Altshuler and Dag Haug Hampshire College/UMass, Amherst and University of Oslo 8 March 2017 Deutsche Gesellschaft f¨ ur Sprachwissenschaft 1 Introduction (1) Pronominal anaphora a. Phil tickled Stanley. b. Liz poked him... (Smyth 1994) c. ...Phil didn’t retaliate. • It possible to interpret (1-a) and (1-b) as being connected via Parallel; him is resolved to Stanley. • The continuation in (1-c) forces a reinterpretation: (1-a) and (1-b) are now understood to be connected via Result; him is resolved to Phil. Generalization : Inferring a rhetorical relation between two discourse units (DUs) is non-monotonic (Las- carides and Asher 1993, Asher and Lascarides 2003). If establishing rhetorical relations and resolving the interpretation of pronoun are correlated and mutually constraining tasks (Hobbs 1979, Kehler et al. 2008, Stojnic 2016), then the resolution of a pronoun is provisional. (2) Temporal anaphora a. Phil screamed with pain in his eyes. b. Liz poked him... (Altshuler 2016) c. ...She hated loud noise. Key question : What semantics should we assign to anaphoric expressions such that we could model their resolution as being provisional? Partial Compositional DRT (Haug 2014) : Proposes an answer to this question w.r.t. pronominal anaphora. Goal : We extend PCDRT to analyze temporal anaphora and cataphora in Sylvie by G´ erard de Nerval, where, famously, the reader chooses a resolution strategy that she later finds to be wrong. The proposed analysis models non-monotonic inference over the semantic contents in anaphora and cataphora resolution, leading to a better understanding of compositional interpretation at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Roadmap • A look at the key passages of Sylvie. • Toy SDRT analysis of a simplified discourse, drawing on literary insight from Hobbs [1990], Eco [1998]. • Brief discussion of Muskens’s (1996) CDRT and Haug’s (2014) proposed extension to account for the provisional nature of pronouns. • Propose a way to extend Haug’s (2014) PCDRT to temporal anaphora and cataphora. • Putting it all together: Derive why a reader of Sylvie is forced to revise their resolution strategy. • Conclusion 1