Approaches,to Japanese zero pronouns: Centering and relevance

e O O O O O O O 0 O O O @ O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O O O O @ O O O O @ O O O Approachesto Japanese zero pronouns: Centering and relevance Tomoko Matsui International Christian University Division of Languages • 3-10-20sawa Mitaka, Tokyo, JAPAN 181 matsui@icu.ac.jp Abstract Accessibility of candidate referents is a crucial factor in successful reference assignment and this intuition has been adequately accommodated and developed in centering theory. By contrast, another equally important factor involved in reference assignment, namely, accessibility of contextual assumptions, seems to have not been addressed fully as a part of a computational theory of reference. In the field of pragmatics, however, the role of context has always been one of the central issues and the recent approach to context selection based on the notion of relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995) seems to be currently the most promising. In this paper, I will review and assess the recent centering approach to the interpretation of Japanese zero pronouns (Walker et al. 1994) as a case study, and suggest that relevance theory can provide one way of complementing it. In order •to incorporate a needed mechanism of contextual selection into a model of reference assignment, model builders must take into account the heater's ability to anticipate certain cognitive effects that may be achieved by upcoming utterances. It is my hope that this paper will lead to a fruitful discussion of finding possible ways of using Sperber & Wilson-'s notion of relevance in practical applications. 1. Introduction When a system has to assign a referent to a referring expression, it is almost always the case that there is more than one candidate referents and one has to resort to some Way of eliminating the wrong candidates in order to choose the right one. There are two main ways of doing this. First, candidate referents can be ranked on the basis of accessibility (Erlm & Gundel 1987; Fretheim and Gundal 1996; C~mbacher and Hargreaves 1988, Grosz et al. 1995; Sidner 1983a, b; Walker et al. 1998). Alternatively, they can be checked against the accessibility of contextual assumptions (F'mcher-Kiefex 1993; Kintsch 1988, Magliano et al. 1993; McKoon & Ratcliff 1992; Sanford & Garrod 1981; Sharkey & Sharkey 1987; Singer 1993, 1995). In either case, once a candidate is singled out, the acceptability of the referent needs to be tested against some pragmatic criteria. Currently, we seem to have at least three distinct criteria available: i. Truth-based criterion- i.e. whether the overall, interpretation is likely to be factually plausible (Clark 1977; Clark & Haviland 1977; Erku & Gundel 1987; Sanford & Gan~ 1981; Sidner 1983a); iL Coherence-based criterion -i.e. whether the overall interpretation is likely to be coherent (Asher & Lascaries 1993; Grosz et al. 1995, 1998; Hobbs 1979; Lascarides & Asher 1993; Sanders et aL 1992; Walker et aL 1994, 1998); Hi. Relevance-based criterion - i.e. whether the overall interpretation is likely to …

Content truncated to 500 words