The Logic of Narratives 9004422129, 9789004422124

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Part 1: Foundation
1 Introduction
2 Narrative Structure
3 The Theoretical Toolkit
Part 2: Timeline
4 Tense and Aspect
5 The Pluperfect
6 The Progressive
7 Temporal Adverb Now
Part 3: Character
8 Free Indirect Discourse
9 Indexicals
10 Definite NPs
11 Expressives
12 Conclusion
Appendix: Episode Structure of The Dead
References
Index

Citation preview

The Logic of Narratives

Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication Series Editors Paul van den Hoven Jan ten Thije

volume 35

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/uslc

The Logic of Narratives By

EunHee Lee

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Image taken from Morguefile.com. Image created by PSchubert. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lee, EunHee, 1967- author. Title: The logic of narratives / EunHee Lee. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, 2020. | Series: Utrecht studies in language and communication, 09277706 ; 35 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020002581 (print) | LCCN 2020002582 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004422124 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004423343 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Discourse analysis, Narrative. | Narration (Rhetoric) Classification: LCC P302.7 .L43 2020 (print) | LCC P302.7 (ebook) | DDC 401/.41–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002581 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002582

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 0927-7706 ISBN 978-90-04-42212-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42334-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To Mark, Dylan and Sarah

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Contents List of Figures and Tables

ix

Part 1 Foundation 1

2

3

Introduction 3 1 Why the “Logic” of Narratives? 2 An Overview of the Book 6

3

Narrative Structure 11 1 Defining Narratives 11 2 The Temporal Interpretation of Narratives 3 Coherence 22 The Theoretical Toolkit 34 1 Dynamic Semantics 34 2 Discourse Representation Theory 3 Perspectival DRT 46

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Part 2 Timeline 4

Tense and Aspect 63 1 Tense in Narratives 63 2 Narrative Progression and Aspect 70 3 A PDRT Analysis of Tense and Aspect 82

5

The Pluperfect 87 1 Background 87 2 A Corpus Study of the Pluperfect in Narratives 3 A PDRT Analysis of the Pluperfect 100

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The Progressive 106 1 Background 106 2 A Corpus Study of the Progressive in Narratives 3 A PDRT Analysis of the Progressive 121

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Temporal Adverb Now 126 1 Background 126 2 A Corpus Study of Now 132 3 A PDRT Analysis of Now 138

Part 3 Character 8

Free Indirect Discourse 145 1 Background 145 2 An Empirical Study of FID 159 3 A PDRT Analysis of FID 164

9

Indexicals 169 1 Background 169 2 An Empirical Study 174 3 A PDRT Analysis of Indexicals

10

Definite NPs 181 1 Background 181 2 An Empirical Study 188 3 A PDRT Analysis of Definites

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Expressives 199 1 Background 199 2 An Empirical Study of Expressives 206 3 A PDRT Analysis of Expressives 210

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Conclusion 215 1 Summary 215 2 Linguistic Study of Narratives and Its Implications Appendix: Episode Structure of The Dead References 228 Index 242

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Figures and Tables Figures 1 2 3 4 5

Narrative organization 15 A schematic picture of events 17 A schematic picture of states 18 The discourse structure of (40) 30 The discourse structure of (41) 31

Tables 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Orientation and Episodes 1 and 2 of The Dead 16 Aspect and grounding in Joyce’s The Dead (n = 786) 72 Aspect and grounding in chapters 2 and 3 of Backman’s A Man Called Ove (n = 393) 75 Grammatical aspect in The Dead (n = 203) 77 Grammatical aspect in Chapters 2 and 3 of A Man Called Ove (n = 112) 79 Lexical aspect of the main clause in the pluperfect form 93 Aspectual vs. preterit readings 93 Aspectual class and (non-)continuative reading 94 Aspectual classes in the progressive 114 Coherence relations 118 The distribution of now sentences in narrative discourse 133 Speech and thought representation in The Dead 159 Speech and thought representation in A Man Called Ove, Chapter 2 162 Different definite NP forms in The Dead 188 Different definite NP forms in FID in The Dead 189 Different definite NP forms in Chapters 2 and 3 of A Man Called Ove 193 Different definite NP forms in FID in Chapters 2 and 3 of A Man Called Ove 193

part 1 Foundation

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We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us. Jerome Bruner

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chapter 1

Introduction 1

Why the “Logic” of Narratives?

Narrative or story telling as a genre is an ancient one. Narratives have been produced and consumed by individuals and communities probably for tens of thousands of years in myths, rituals, history, literary arts, fairy tales, everyday conversations, and even internal monologues. Narratives appear to be fundamental to our existence. Personal narratives often act like a mental thread that connects the scattered beads of moments in our lives, urging us to go on in psychic continuity and solidifying our boundaries as individuals. In fictional narratives, a particular story with particular characters in a specific time and place never stops there. It always points toward something bigger, something universal, or something that is common to all human experiences and thus relatable. In the words of James Joyce: “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal” (Power, 1949, p. 6). Causally or consequentially connected events and explanations for their occurrences give us a frame of reference for understanding how the world works, influencing our beliefs and affecting our actions. The production of narratives is often compared to constructing a building or crafting an artistic object. You don’t just throw in a bunch of unrelated events in random order and expect the reader to figure out the story. Instead, events occurring in a story must be carefully organized in an orderly manner and also must hang together, with each event having a specific function contributing to the whole story. In other words, narratives seem to follow certain rules for their creation, much like a sentence is formed according to the grammatical rules of the language. However, we do not normally think about narratives that way since such narrative construction ‘rules’, if such things exist, are perceived as more ‘stylistic’ than grammatical. Despite this common perception, this book will argue that narratives do have grammar and logic; it proposes a theory of narrative production and comprehension from a formal linguistic, rather than literary or stylistic, point of view. I will put forward the thesis that narratives are compositional and logical. In other words, the meaning of a narrative is the function of the meaning of every sentence occurring in it and the way they are put together and thus compositional, and certain conclusions and inferences drawn from the events happening in narratives are

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considered valid and hence logical. If this were not the case, then how could we explain our following abilities: to readily recognize the various rhetorical relations among sentences; to draw episode boundaries with ease; to follow the constantly moving story line with little difficulty by keeping track of characters and events; and to intuitively distinguish between the narrator’s and the characters’ thoughts and perspectives, across a possibly infinite number of different stories? Traditionally, linguistics is only concerned with the sentence structure as a basic unit of inquiry, treating discourse relations in narratives as outside its scope of investigation and belonging to pragmatics or stylistics. Therefore, earlier generations of linguists did not feel particularly obliged to explain the narrative structure. Only recently has a systematic linguistic account for the distinctive features of narratives been proposed. Starting with Banfield’s (1982) seminal book from a generative grammatical perspective, Unspeakable Sentences, different scholars have approached the task of providing linguistic analyses for narratives from different angles. Scholars like Ehrlich (1990), Fludernik (1993, 2009) and Dancygier (2011) propose a more relaxed pragmatic-cognitive model than Banfield’s, while sociolinguists (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2015) emphasize experiential and social aspects of narratives. Alternatively, computational linguists (Grosz and Sidner, 1986; Hobbs, 1990; Sanford and Emmott, 2012) utilize narrative processing models commonly found in the fields of Psycholinguistics and Artificial Intelligence, and formal semanticists (Asher and Lascarides 2003; Doron, 1991; Eckardt, 2014; Kamp and Reyle 1993; Maier, 2016; Schlenker, 2004; Sharvit, 2008; ter Meulen, 1995) propose dynamic models of discourse updating in model-theoretic semantics. The current book is a further contribution to these more open-minded research efforts. It will address the relative paucity of linguistic and formal semantic analyses of narrative structure in comparison with the copious publications on narratives from a literary perspective. Discourse and literary studies on narratives are focused on pragmatic and stylistic factors, such as genre expectations and character analyses, and pay relatively little attention to the exact linguistic forms and constructions that are used and how their formal meanings expand to express the author’s and the characters’ viewpoints and intentions. On the other hand, as I have mentioned, because the field of linguistics is mostly concerned with sentence-level structure and meaning, few studies have been devoted to describing the nature of narratives. This book seeks to bridge that divide. The contribution this book makes is twofold. On the empirical side, this book expands the data coverage of the existing linguistic work on discourse by examining naturally occurring narratives. I will use examples of short sto-

introduction

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ries and novels randomly selected from the British National Corpus (BNC)1 to provide quantitative analyses for relevant linguistic expressions. To supplement disconnected corpus examples from different stories by different authors, which sometimes make it difficult to observe a consistent style and pattern of discourse connectivity, I will also examine two literary works, one from the twentieth century, James Joyce’s (1882–1941) The Dead (1914), and one from the twenty-first century, Fredrik Backman’s (1981–) A Man Called Ove (2012).2 The value of corpus and natural discourse data lies in their ability to reveal unexpected features of linguistic expressions that are often inaccessible from introspection alone. The combined results of studying both the corpus and literary works will provide a wealth of naturalistic data and will show that we can gain new insights even into extensively studied topics by looking at the actual use in natural context, while at the same time contributing to the development of a methodology for data collection and analysis. Hopefully, they will also inspire new perspectives for literary studies and deliver practical applications for modeling machine discourse processing in computer science and Artificial Intelligence.

1 “The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million-word collection of written and spoken language samples from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the latter part of the twentieth century, both spoken and written. The written part of the BNC (90 %) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. The spoken part (10%) consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations (recorded by volunteers selected from different ages, regions and social classes in a demographically balanced way) and spoken language collected in different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins” (From the BNC website, natcorp.ox.ac.uk). 2 The Dead and A Man Called Ove are both third-person narratives. The Dead is a short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce, who is regarded as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. The story is about Gabriel Conroy, a young professor and book reviewer, and his relationships with his family, friends, and Irish identity. A Man Called Ove (2012) is about a 59-year-old widower, Ove Lindahl, who lives in a townhouse neighborhood. He’s an easily irritated old man who complains a lot and stubbornly sticks to his “principles” and routines. He is depressed after losing his wife, who recently died of cancer. After working at the same company for 43 years, he is forced into retirement. His attempts to hang himself are repeatedly interrupted by Iranian immigrant Parvaneh, her Swedish husband and their two daughters, who move into the house across the street. He ends up developing a close relationship with them and dies a natural death in the end. I chose this novel because it is written in contemporary language, and it is fairly easy to identify Free Indirect Discourse, a distinctive literary style that the narrator uses to convey what the character says or thinks.

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On the theoretical side, to make the semantic and pragmatic properties of narratives clear and precise, I will employ Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) (Kamp and Reyle, 1993), a dynamic semantic tool developed to explain inter-sentential anaphoric relations. As I will discuss in Chapter 3, what is lacking in classic DRT and its varieties, such as Segmented DRT (Asher and Lascarides, 2003), Layered DRT (Maier, 2009), and structured DRT (Hunter, 2013), is a means to systematically encode different points of view in narratives, genre difference (narrative vs. non-narrative), and episode structure, which affect the interpretations of numerous natural language expressions such as tenses, pronouns, indexicals, and expressives, to name a few. DRT is not specifically designed for narratives, so it does not recognize the fundamental processing differences between conversational and narrative discourse types. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no attempt to use a DRT framework for character perspective or episode structure in narratives. I will incorporate these features and call this new version of DRT Perspectival DRT (PDRT). Ideally, the theoretical innovation on dynamic semantics in the framework of PDRT offered in this book will advance our current thinking in discourse semantics and pragmatics, resulting in a sharpened theoretical tool to analyze a wider range of natural discourse data. While focused on a formal linguistic analysis of narratives, this book may have larger implications and applications for related fields due to its interdisciplinary nature. The goal is to contribute to the academic discourse about narratives taking place in a number of fields, as scholarly interest in narratives or story-telling, traditionally been restricted to the Humanities, is currently growing in many social scientific disciplines. This book will contextualize the logical aspect of narratives within the range of current issues in the interdisciplinary study of narratives being conducted in diverse academic fields.

2

An Overview of the Book

This book consists of three parts dealing with the three fundamental issues of narratives: Part 1 presents the theoretical concepts and tools, Part 2 concerns events, and Part 3 is about characters. Undoubtedly, events and characters are the two pillars of a narrative, which represents a story of people situated in time and space experiencing events happening around them. Part 1 lays out the foundational concepts and theories that will be the basis for analyzing events and characters in narratives in the subsequent chapters. The current chapter explains the book’s basic orientation/perspective on narrative, the book’s distinctive features and unique contributions, and provides

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a brief outline and synopsis of the book. Chapter 2 presents fundamental concepts in the study of narratives, starting with an operational definition of them. In section 1, after distinguishing narrative and non-narrative discourse types, I delve into the architecture of the narratives by introducing the foreground vs. background distinction (Hopper, 1979; Labov, 1972) and episodes that make up the nucleus of a complete narrative (Chafe, 1987; van Dijk, 1981). In section 2, I examine aspectual classes that help make the foreground and background distinction possible, together with operational tests to determine them (Dowty, 1979; Vendler, 1967). In section 3, rhetorical or coherence relations such as Narration, Explanation, and Elaboration, and the way in which pronoun resolution is affected by them, are discussed in detail (Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Stojnic et al., 2017). Chapter 3 introduces a theoretical tool to represent and analyze narratives. After providing some background on dynamic semantics in section 1, I will examine the classic Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) of Kamp and Reyle (1993) and its offshoots, Asher and Lascarides’ (2003) Segmented DRT (SDRT), Maier’s (2006, 2009) Layered DRT (LDRT), and Hunter’s (2013) structured DRT in section 2. In section 3, I will describe my new version, Perspectival DRT (PDRT), delineating its syntax and semantics. The construction of an imaginary narrative timeline and the use of various temporal and aspectual expressions to locate events and states on it constitute the main themes of Part 2. From Chapter 4 to Chapter 7, various tense and aspect markers are analyzed with respect to their functions in narratives as illustrated through case studies. In analyzing individual temporal and aspectual expressions, my guiding principle is that the meaning of individual words cannot be properly understood unless we expand the scope of inquiry beyond the sentence level to an examination of naturally occurring narrative data, because their interpretation and use crucially depend on the information derived from larger discourse contexts. Chapter 4 brings home the point that narratives are more or less constructed independently of the coordinates of its actual production and reception, and thus the normal deictic function of tense in everyday use of language is lost in this genre, forcing tense to take on an anaphoric role. As a result, temporal relations between events and states on the narrative timeline become the source of an adequate understanding of the narrative. I will demonstrate the tangential function of grammatical tense in narratives based on an empirical study of the mixed tense uses in A Man Called Ove. My claim that lexical and grammatical aspect, rather than tense, determines the temporal relation in narratives is empirically supported by examining The Dead and A Man Called Ove. The result of the quantitative study is followed by a PDRT analysis of tensed event and state sentences in narratives.

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In Chapter 5, I discuss further discourse semantic constraints imposed on the use of the pluperfect form in narratives in addition to its usual flashback effect (Caenepeel and Sandström, 1992; Lascarides and Asher, 1992). A quantitative analysis of corpus examples drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) reveals a new aspect of the meaning of the pluperfect, such as its normative-modal presupposition, leading to a unified analysis of the pluperfect in PDRT. Chapter 6 focuses on the progressive, whose semantic composition raises some puzzling questions that have vexed semanticists for a long time (Dowty, 1972, 1979). A corpus study will be presented to show that the use of the progressive in narratives often signals a character perspective, and also that the progressive clause becomes coherent without a cohesive link with its antecedent clause due to the perspective binding (Banfield, 1982; Ehrlich, 1990). PDRT is well suited to capture the semantics of the progressive because it is equipped with a logical means to represent perspective binding in discourse. As was the case with the pluperfect, this chapter will demonstrate that the meaning of the progressive derives from the interplay between its lexical meaning and the discourse coherence principles. In Chapter 7, I examine now with the past tense in narratives, whose distribution is much broader than other similar indexical expressions. Unlike previous analyses that have tried to derive this property solely from the lexical meaning of now, thus treating it as a special case (Altshuler, 2010; Hunter, 2012), I argue that the temporal perspective shift and temporal relations are functions of narrative discourse itself rather than the lexical semantics of now. This claim will be supported via a quantitative study of corpus examples drawn from BNC. After that, a PDRT analysis of now with the past tense in narratives will be provided. Part 3, Character, investigates the way in which the speech and thoughts of different characters are conveyed by the narrator using a literary style called Free Indirect Discourse (FID). From Chapter 8 through Chapter 11, various linguistic markings for a subjective perspective are examined through quantitative studies of The Dead and A Man Called Ove. In Chapter 8, after providing an overview of linguistic features of FID, I examine the previous semantic analyses of FID in order to assess our current understanding of this distinctive style (Doron, 1991; Eckardt, 2014; Schlenker, 2004; Sharvit, 2008; Maier, 2017). Common to the most previous studies of FID is the assumption of dual contexts (the actual speech context and a separate “inner” or “thought” context) and individual lexical specifications on context-dependent items (pronouns, tenses, and indexicals) regarding the context upon which their meaning depends. Naturally, these studies explicitly or implicitly advocate the dualvoice hypothesis, which argues that the voice of the objective narrator is mixed

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with that of the subjective character in FID (Baxtin, 1929/1984; Pascal, 1977). Unlike these previous studies, I will argue that pronouns and tenses may be null in FID rather than being indexical to the speaker/narrator (Sharvit, 2008), obviating the need to postulate the dual contexts and thus supporting the original no-narrator hypothesis (Banfield, 1982). In addition, I will test via a quantitative study the hypothesis that major characters’ speech will typically be in FID, indicating the narrator’s relegation of the narrative voice to these important characters, whereas a newly introduced or minor character’s speech or unapproved content will take the form of quotation or indirect speech, signaling a lack of empathy. Such different degrees of narrator empathy are difficult to analyze using classic DRT, and thus a PDRT analysis of FID will showcase the usefulness of this new framework. Chapter 9 deals with so-called “shifty” indexicals. A very salient characteristic of FID is that indexical expressions, which are traditionally assumed to be unaffected by attitude operators (Kaplan, 1978), appear to be anchored to the character. After reviewing previous studies that provide a lexical solution (Anand and Nevins, 2004; Schenker, 2003, 2004), I propose a uniform semantic analysis of indexicals as denoting coordinates of the most prominent point of view. This claim will gain empirical support from the results of a quantitative study of indexicals from the short story and chapters of the novel and will be formalized using PDRT. Chapter 10 investigates the way in which the use of different nominal forms for given entities, such as definite descriptions (Heim, 1982; Russell, 1905), de se pronouns (Casteñeda, 1966; Chierchia, 1989; Lewis, 1979), and logophors (Clements, 1975; Kuno, 1987; Sells, 1987), signals subjective character perspectives. It examines whether definite descriptions are invariably de dicto, interpreted from the character’s perspective, whether pronouns are anaphoric to the most prominent character and encode his or her de se belief (belief about self), and whether reflexives display the characteristics of logophoric pronouns, through a quantitative study of definites in The Dead and A Man Called Ove. PDRT analyses of these various definite forms will be offered. Chapter 11 analyzes expressives, such as epithets like the jerk and evaluative adjectives such as bloody. Ever since Potts (2005) pointed out that expressives, together with appositives, are invariably speaker-oriented regardless of their syntactic position, scholars have studied this intriguing issue closely. After discussing the current debate surrounding the semantics of expressives, an empirical study of them will show that they are invariably anchored to the character, rather than the narrator. It follows that expressives are perspectivesensitive expressions rather than speaker-oriented. A PDRT analysis of them will be proven useful due to its logical means to encode the character perspective.

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Chapter 12 concludes the book with a summary of the chapters and a discussion about future directions in the linguistic study of narratives and its connection with narrative analyses in neighboring fields, such as literary studies and cognitive science.

chapter 2

Narrative Structure 1

Defining Narratives

1.1 Narrative vs. Non-narrative Discourse Types Genre difference plays an important role in determining discourse structure. Polanyi (2008, p. 266) describes this fact lucidly: “Genre units such as stories, negotiations, or arguments have a characteristic constituent structure in which expected types of information are deployed in a conventionally agreed-upon manner. Similarly, in speech events such as doctor–patient interactions, formal lectures, business meetings, church services or blind dates, etc., the participants know when they are in one phase of the activity or in another and behave accordingly.” Narratives are defined as a representation of a series of connected events in which a verbal sequence of clauses matches the order in which those events take place1 (Abbot, 2008; Chatman, 1980; Fludernik, 2009; Herman, 2009; Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972). An example of narrative discourse is given in (1) from Labov (1972), in which we perceive temporal progressions between the narrative clauses; the drunken person attacked the narrator, and then his friend came in, after which she stopped the attack. (1) Well this person had a little too much to drink and he attacked me. And the friend came in and she stopped it. Due to the defining feature of narratives—temporal relations matching the clausal order—there is a fundamental processing difference between narra1 Sociolinguists have recently begun defining the narrative much more broadly, including everyday conversational storytelling as social practices, called “small stories” (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2015). In this new trend, called the “narrative turn” in social sciences, temporal progression is not always considered to be the defining feature of narratives; instead experiential and social aspects are emphasized (e.g., Ochs and Capps, 2002). Since this book focuses on formal linguistic features of narratives, rather than their variable and diverse (and often non-linguistic) social functions, I will stick with the definition of narratives defined as above following the ‘chrono-logic’, the sequence of events that constitute the plot (Chatman, 1980). One more thing to keep in mind is that the narrative vs. non-narrative distinction should not be confused with the difference between written and spoken modes of communication. It is possible to introduce a narrative context into a conversation (e.g., story-telling) or to introduce a non-narrative context into writings (e.g., descriptions). There are many languages that lack a writing system; yet they all have narratives.

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tive discourse types. In the non-narrative context, where the primary function of tense is to establish a relationship between the described situation and the utterance (speech) time, two consecutive simple past event sentences can be interpreted in a reverse order, as long as world knowledge supports such an interpretation (Dahlgren et al., 1989; Lascarides and Asher, 1993). Most everyday face-to-face conversational exchanges belong to this type of context, in which the utterance is deictically related to the actual situation of speech so that the situational features directly contribute to the understanding of the utterance. For example, (2) is likely to be interpreted as reverse order in non-narratives since one may assume that the pushing caused the falling and thus temporally precedes it. Such an interpretation is possible, I argue, because the past tense in each clause in non-narratives is indexical to the speech time and thus can be independent from each other. (2) John fell. Max pushed him. When a discourse is constructed as a narrative or a story, on the other hand, it is presented as if disconnected from the actual time/space coordinate at which it is produced and received. As a result, the normal deictic function of tense in everyday use of language is lost in this genre, forcing tense to take on an anaphoric role (Kamp and Rohrer, 1983; Partee, 1984). The loss of deictic temporal reference in narratives is offset by the construction of an imaginary narrative timeline whose existence depends entirely on the discourse itself. Since the lack of obvious relationship between described events and the speech time imposes greater discourse-internal restrictions on temporal relations, two simple past event sequences are very difficult to be interpreted in a reverse order. Consequently, in narratives we will not normally find sentences like (2) in an explanation interpretation. In narratives, they tend to be interpreted in a sequential order, and if the reverse order is intended, the pluperfect form must be used (Caenepeel and Sandström, 1992; Lee, 2010, 2017). A quote from Robert Musil (1943, pp. 708–709) describes the power of linearity of narrative as follows: “When one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one’s life, the basic law of this life, the law one yearns for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that allows one to say: ‘First this happened and then that happened …’ It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated ‘thread of the story,’ which is, it seems, the thread of life itself.” Abbott (2008, p. 41) puts it in slightly different terms, “We are made in such a way that we continually look for the

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causes of things. The inevitable linearity of story makes narrative a powerful means of gratifying this need.” A linguistic test that can differentiate between narrative and non-narrative clauses, then, is whether a change in the order alters the interpretation of the discourse. Labov (1972) observes that clauses containing used to, would, general present, and subordinate clauses do not form a narrative. As shown in (3) from Labov (ibid.), non-narratives, after having changed the order of events, still express the same meaning. (3) a. If you didn’t bring her candy to school, she would punch you in the mouth. b. She would punch you in the mouth if you didn’t bring her candy to school. In narratives, by contrast, changing the order of the clauses results in a significant change in meaning, or even anomaly (marked by #). In the stretch of discourse in (1) above, if the order in which events take place or states are held is not presented in a sequential order of the sentences, as in (4), for example, the discourse could sound incoherent or even untrue. (4) #She stopped it. He attacked me. The friend came in. This person had a little too much to drink. 1.2 The Foreground vs. Background Distinction The skeleton of a narrative consists of a series of temporally ordered event clauses, which are called narrative clauses (Labov, 1972) or foreground (Hopper, 1979). Any number of clauses that elaborate, evaluate, or comment on the narrated main events can come between two narrative clauses, which are called free clauses (Labov, 1972) or background (Hopper, 1979). In other words, the bare bones of narrative structures can be fleshed out with background clauses, which are typically stative, imperfective, and irrealis, and also stay outside of the narrative timeline (Dowty, 1986; Dry, 1983; Hinrich, 1986; Kamp and Rohrer, 1983; Kamp and Reyle, 1993; Kehler, 2002; Partee, 1984; Webber, 1988). The example in (1) above is annotated with this basic distinction in (5). We perceive a temporal progression between narrative clauses. By contrast, because free clauses are not part of the narrative timeline, (5a) holds true for the entire discourse in (5) and thus temporally overlaps with the narrated events. Moreover, the fact that free clauses are mostly states, which are assumed to persist unless otherwise indicated, adds a further explanation to the temporal overlap relation.

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(5) a. Well this person had a little too much to drink → Free clause/background b. and he attacked me. → Narrative clause/foreground c and the friend came in → Narrative clause/foreground d and she stopped it. → Narrative clause/foreground A question arises as to what kinds of materials go into foreground and background, respectively. Foreground does not necessarily consist of the most central and important events in the story. Background can be as important as foreground because it provides the necessary details for reconstructing the story that help determine the meaning and the purpose of the narrative (Reinhart, 1984). The foreground versus background distinction does not correspond to new and old information, either. Foreground can elaborate on an old event, and background can introduce new information. I propose that the explicit or implicit question that the narrator and reader try to answer, which is dubbed the ‘Question Under Discussion (QUD)’ (Carroll et al., 2003; Roberts, 2012), determines the foreground or main structure and background or side structure. Different types of discourses have different questions (Hopper and Thompson, 1980). The QUD of narratives is “What happened (next)?”. A main structure/foreground consists of the sentences that directly answer this question (constituent events), and side structures/background include sentences that do not directly answer this question but instead provide supplementary information (supplementary events). QUD denotes a set of possible alternative answers formed by our expectations and imaginations, and by reading on to answer those questions, we seek a more complete picture of the (narrative) world. As I will discuss shortly, the possible alternative courses of events are often constrained by narrative continuity or coherence. 1.3 Components of Narratives Labov (1972) and Labov and Waletzky (1967) identify abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, result, and coda as the components of a fully formed (oral) narrative. A schematic representation of the organization of a narrative is given in the diagram in Figure 1 below. The black dots indicate foreground and the white dot represents background. Evaluation is concurrent with complicating actions, which can create more than one episode in a recursive manner, which is represented using the kleen star *. Optional abstract and coda are placed between parentheses. The left-to-right order reflects the flow of time, and the hierarchical relation indicates that orientation holds true for the entire narrative. The abstract and coda, which are optional, are introductory and concluding remarks such as once upon a time or the end, respectively. Orientation provides

narrative structure

figure 1

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Narrative organization

background information necessary to understand and interpret the story, such as the characters and setting. Complicating action is the nucleus of the narrative, composed of episodes. A short narrative can be just a single episode, but narratives typically contain a number of different episodes. According to van Dijk (1981, p. 177), “episodes are characterized as coherent sequence of sentences of a discourse, linguistically marked for beginning, and/or end, and further defined in terms of identical participants, time, location, or global event or action.” Similarly, Chafe (1987, p. 42) draws an episode boundary where there is a “significant change in scene, time, character configuration, event structure, and the like.” At each episode boundary, there is a change in all of these, making each episode a self-contained whole in terms of setting and characters as well as thematic consistency. Fabb (1997) discusses different linguistic forms indicating episode boundaries, such as connectives and a shift in tense. Using Chafe’s (1987) criteria of significant change in location, time, character, and event structure for the division of episodes, I separated Joyce’s The Dead into orientation, seven episodes and resolution. Table 1 below presents the orientation and the first two episodes of The Dead. The numbers in the parentheses indicate the consecutive number of clauses (The Dead consists of the total of 989 clauses). Within an episode, a scene change occurs when any one of the location, time, character, or event structure changes. The complete episode structure of The Dead can be found in the Appendix. Evaluation refers to the explanations and commentary on complicating actions described in episodes. It often establishes the supremacy of one side or another in a conflict between characters as well as values, ideas, and the worldviews (Abbott, 2008). Finally, the result is the resolution of the complicating action, which is the ultimate goal and purpose of the narrative. Depending on the genre (e.g., romance, tragedy), we have certain expectations about the type of closure we are likely to encounter, and although these expectations, which we constantly anticipate throughout the course of a narrative, are often satisfied in the end, sometimes such expectations are thwarted by surprising resolutions.

16 table 1

chapter 2 Orientation and episodes 1 and 2 of The Dead Location

Character(s)

Main event(s)

Orientation (character and setting) (1–33)

Misses Morkan’s house

Lily, Kate, Julia, Mary Jane

Lily greets guests; Misses Morkan’s household and annual dance are described.

Episode 1 Gabriel’s arrival (34–77)

Downstairs

Gabriel, Lily, Gretta, Kate, Julia

Gabriel and his wife Gretta arrive; Awkward conversation between Gabriel and Lily about Lily’s love life; Gabriel bribes Lily.

Gabriel Guests at the party

Gabriel reviews his speech notes and worries that his inferior audience would not understand it.

Episode 2 Scene 2-1 Upstairs Gabriel reviews his outside the speech notes (78–90) drawing-room Scene 2-2 Gabriel’s conversation with his aunts (91–134)

2

Upstairs in Gabriel, Gretta, front of the Julia, Kate ladies dressing room

Gabriel discusses with Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate his decision to stay at a hotel that evening; Gretta teases Gabriel’s dedication to galoshes.

The Temporal Interpretation of Narratives

2.1 Aspectual Class of Predicates Since Dry’s (1983) seminal work, many researchers working on the phenomenon of aspect and temporal interpretation in discourse (Dowty, 1986; Hinrich, 1986; Kamp and Reyle, 1993; Kamp and Rohrer, 1983; Kehler, 2002; Partee, 1984; Webber, 1988) have shown that events, especially telic event descriptions (accomplishment and achievement), perfective, and inceptive clauses form foreground, moving the narrative time forward, whereas state, imperfective, and modal clauses belong to background, maintaining the given time in the narrative. If the foreground and background distinction hinges on the aspectual class of the main predicate and its grammatical aspect, then the fundamental structure of narratives may be grammatically and formally determined. Aspectual class of predicates, also known as lexical/verbal aspect, refers to the features inherent in the lexical items that describe a situation.2 Figure 2

2 The whole predicate (i.e., VP) rather than the verb alone determines the aspectual class

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preparatory phase I figure 2

culmination point | II

result state III

A schematic picture of events

contains a schematic picture of an event from Kamp and Reyle (1993, p. 558). The aspectual properties of predicates indicate which part(s) of the schema correspond to the eventualities that they describe. Vendler (1967) classifies predicates into four aspectual classes of state, activity, accomplishment, and achievement in accordance with the presence or absence of the semantic features [±dynamic], [±telic], and [±punctual]. (6) contains simple examples of Vendler’s four aspectual types. (6) a. b. c d

Gabriel gave a speech. Gabriel arrived. Gabriel listened to the piano. Gabriel knows Miss Ivors.

Accomplishments, such as (6a), describe durative events that have built-in goals (culmination), corresponding to parts I and II of the schema in Figure 2. Achievements like (6b) consist of solely their culmination point II; the phase leading up to the culmination point, I, is not part of such an event. These are ‘instantaneous’ transitions in a semantic or conceptual sense because even such atomic events do take time in reality. Activities (or processes) such as (6c) indicate events that do not have a natural end-point (called ‘atelic’). They only correspond to Part 1 of the schema and do not provide II by themselves, i.e., II is arbitrary rather than built-in. Therefore, an essential feature of activities is that they are homogeneous, e.g., a part of listening to the piano is also listening to the piano (a sub-interval property, Bennett and Partee, 1978). Stative verbs like (6d), on the other hand, lack a culmination point, and thus they contain no intrinsic separation of two distinct periods in the eventuality schema, as represented in Figure 3 below by a single, unbroken line. A state forms a class of indefinitely extending states of affairs that involve no dynamics.

(Dowty, 1979; Verkuyl, 1972). An activity verb, for example, becomes an accomplishment when there is a goal or measure adverbial, e.g., John walked vs. John walked to the store/for two hours. Therefore, it is more accurate to talk about the aspectual class of the main predicates rather than lexical aspect of the verb.

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figure 3

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A schematic picture of states

2.2 Operational Tests for Aspectual Classes Aspectual classes of predicates can be objectively determined utilizing a set of operational tests developed in Dowty (1979) and the subsequent literature. First, states and activities are distinguished in terms of the feature [±dynamic]. Activities are [+dynamic] and thus can take the progressive form, which indicates an ongoing state of doing something, as in (7a). On the other hand, states are [-dynamic] and are not compatible with the progressive, as shown in (7b). (7) a. Gabriel is talking. b. #Gabriel is being tall. Due to their dynamicity, activities in the present tense have a habitual reading. States in the present, on the other hand, lack a habitual interpretation but instead describes a plain state. For example, (8a) means that Gabriel dances regularly, while (8b) does not have such an interpretation. (8) a. Gabriel dances. b. Gabriel is tall. Because they are dynamic events, activities can occur with manner adverbials, as shown in (9a), but states cannot, as illustrated in (9b). (9) a. Gabriel dances enthusiastically. b. #Gabriel is tall deliberately. Activities involve agency and therefore can occur in imperatives or in a force X to do Y construction, as shown in (10a) and (11a). By contrast, states cannot appear in such constructions, as demonstrated in (10b) and (11b). (10) a. Dance! b. #Be tall! (11) a. Miss Ivors forced Gabriel to dance. b. #Miss Ivors forced Gabriel to be tall. Second, activities and accomplishments differ in terms of [±telic]. Activities are [-telic] (or atelic), which means that they lack an inherent (i.e., event-internal)

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culmination/end point. As a result, they can be modified by the adverbial for as in (12a), but resist the modification by in as in (12b), unless they have an inchoative reading, i.e., Gabriel danced after two hours. (12) a. Gabriel danced for two hours. b. #Gabriel danced in two hours. Accomplishments are [+telic], meaning that their eventuality description inherently contains an endpoint. Due to the telicity, they can be modified by in, implying that the described action was ongoing for the time interval specified by in. That is, (13a) entails (13b). (13) a. Gabriel wrote an article in two weeks. b. Gabriel was writing an article for two weeks. Activities in the progressive form entail the past form, whereas accomplishments do not allow such entailment relations. (14a) entails (14b), whereas (15a) does not entail (15b). (14) a. Gabriel is dancing. b. Gabriel danced. (15) a. Gabriel is writing an article. b. Gabriel wrote an article. Third, accomplishments and achievements are different in terms of [±punctual]. Achievements are [+punctual], i.e., they denote instantaneous change of state events; they are only compatible with in as in (16a) but cannot occur with for as shown in (16b). (16) a. Gabriel arrived in two hours. b. #Gabriel arrived for two hours. Accomplishments are [-punctual] since they describe durative events. When modified by in, they imply that the described action was ongoing for the time interval specified by in, as we have observed in (13) above. By contrast, achievements modified by in do not have such implications. Therefore, (17a) does not entail (17b). (17) a. Gabriel arrived in two hours. b. Gabriel was arriving for two hours.

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Achievements modified by in mean the same as those occurring with after. Hence, (18a) and (18b) are equivalent, entailing each other. (18) a. Gabriel will start his speech in two minutes. b. Gabriel will start his speech after two minutes. Accomplishments modified by in behave differently, as (19a) and (19b) are not the same. (19) a. Gabriel will write an article in two weeks. b. Gabriel will write an article after two weeks. Moreover, accomplishments, when modified by an adverb almost, show ambiguity between a ‘begin’ reading, i.e., the event almost started, and an ‘end’ reading, i.e., the accomplishment was almost realized, as in (20a). Achievements are not ambiguous, having only a ‘begin’ reading, as in (20b). (20) a. Gabriel almost wrote an article. b. Gabriel almost left Gretta. Finally, an adverb such as halfway cannot be used with achievements as in (21a) but is fine with accomplishments as in (21b). (21) a. #Gabriel left Gretta halfway. b. Gabriel wrote an article halfway. As we have observed so far, aspectual classes of the predicate are objectively determined using various linguistic tests, thus forming conventionally determined classes that affect the temporal interpretations of connected clauses in narratives, as we will see in the next section. 2.3 Aspect and Temporal Progression Among the different aspectual classes, events, especially telic event descriptions (accomplishments and achievements), belong to foreground, answering the QUD “What happened next?” and propelling the narrative time forward. Consider (22), which is a slightly modified version of (1) above. (22) This person had a little too much to drink. He attacked me. The friend came in. She stopped it.

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The first sentence is a state description. It simply provides a background to the story. When the second sentence, an activity, is introduced, it sets up a temporal interval in which the drunken person attacked the narrator. We infer that he was still drunk when he attacked the narrator because states are assumed to last unless an event occurs to end it. Activities, although they are event descriptions, do not normally push the narrative time forward because they lack a built-in endpoint, so the following sentence will not describe a later event. Therefore, when the third sentence, an achievement, is introduced, it is inferred that when the friend came in, the drunken person was still attacking the narrator. The last sentence, another achievement, finally moves the narrative time forward, triggering an inference that the attack ended after the friend arrived. I argue that these inferences about temporal relations in narratives are not pragmatic but conventional, as they are a function of the aspectual class of the predicate. In addition to lexical states, grammatical imperfective aspect and modals (non-factual, irrealis) do not advance the narrative time, instead describing states that overlap with the narrated events. Grammatical aspect concerns the internal temporal constituency of an event by presenting a situation as atomic and completed or as ongoing and continuous (Comrie, 1976), which is encoded by linguistic devices such as perfective, imperfective, or progressive auxiliaries and inflections. An example of imperfective, i.e., progressive, from BNC is given in (23). It is inferred from (23) that they were making progress through the traffic lights and that the traffic was becoming lighter when he smiled. (23) He smiled grimly to himself. Already they were making good stop-go progress through the traffic lights of the Edgware Road. And all the time the line of northward-bound traffic was becoming lighter and faster. An example of irrealis (e.g., modals) in (24) implies that the protagonist could achieve bodily quiet and short mental rest while she stopped herself from crying and took sleeping pills for sleep. (24) She forbade herself tears. For sleep, she took sleeping pills. Only in this motionless sitting could she now achieve bodily quiet, even sometimes, briefly, mental rest. In sum, aspectual classes of the predicate and grammatical aspect, such as the progressive form, play a crucial role in determining the foreground and background in narratives. The rule of thumb for temporal interpretations in narratives is that telic event descriptions, which belong to foreground, move the

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narrative time forward, whereas state descriptions, including progressives and modals, are part of background, maintaining the current temporal perspective. Elaboration as in (25), which I will discuss in more detail in the next section, and a state coerced to denote its inceptive event by an explicit temporal adverbial as in (26) are the only systematic exceptions to this general principle. (25) When the cab drew up before the hotel, Gabriel jumped out and, in spite of Mr. Bartell D’Arcy’s protest, paid the driver. He gave the man a shilling over his fare. (26) In his early teens he turned to reading poetry, then to writing it—and, though he showed his poems to his sisters, he kept them secret from his mother. Now, at seventeen, he was bowing to Mrs. Cohen’s wish and had entered University College to study medicine.3

3

Coherence

3.1 Rhetorical Relations The meaning of a narrative is not equal to the mere sum of all the sentences occurring in it. Mann and Thompson (1986, p. 26) use a fitting metaphor to describe this fact: “accounting for all the clauses in the text is only part of the account of the text, a bit like a theory of a wall in which we had an account of the bricks without an account of the mortar.” A narrative is meaningful because it is coherent, that is, it is connected, consistent (i.e., non-contradictory), and relevant (i.e., informative) (Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Grosz and Sidner, 1986; Gruber and Redeker, 2014; Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Kehler, 2002; Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Wolf and Gibson, 2006, inter alia). Dependency relations among clauses in a narrative are reflected not only in a perceived narrative

3 Coercion happens because of a mismatch or a clash between the lexical aspect of predicates and the input constraints of their modifiers and has been analyzed as involving an implicit coercion operator that changes the lexical aspectual type of the predicate (de Swart, 1998; Jackendoff, 1997; Moens and Steedman, 1988; Pustejovsky, 1995; Rothstein, 2004). For example, (ia) and (ib) illustrate that a state can be coerced into an event by emphasizing the starting point or endpoint of the state. (ic) and (id) show that events can also be coerced into states by giving the sentence an iterative or habitual reading. (i) a. John is liking his new job. b. Suddenly, I knew the answer. c. Mary was hiccupping. d. For months, the train arrived late.

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progression or the lack thereof, as we have seen, but also differences in the types of so-called “rhetorical” relations. They are also referred to as ‘discourse relations’ or ‘coherence relations,’ the latter of which henceforth will be used in this book. Commonly acknowledged coherence relations are listed in (27), with their definitions and representative examples, from Asher and Lascarides (2003). (27) a. Max stood up. John greeted him. Narration(α, β): The event described in β is a consequence of (but not necessarily caused by) the event described by α. b. Max fell. John had pushed him. Explanation(α, β): The event described by β explains why α’s event happened (by causing it). c. The council built the bridge. The architect drew up the plans. Elaboration(α, β): β’s event is part of α’s (e.g., by being in the preparatory phase). d. Max opened the door. The room was pitch dark. Background(α, β): The state described in β is the backdrop or circumstances under which the event in α occurred (no causal connection but the event and state temporally overlap). e. Max drives a Toyota. John does, too. Parallel(α, β): α and β have parallel syntactic structures that induce the similarity or uniformity of their content along some relevant dimension. f. We can’t win. But we must keep trying. Contrast(α, β): α and β have parallel syntactic structures that induce contrasting themes. Let us look at some naturally occurring examples of these coherence relations. (28) is an example from The Dead where clauses are connected in the coherence relation Narration. The three events, Kate and Julia coming down the stairs, kissing Gretta, and asking her about Gabriel are temporally sequenced, moving the narrative time forward. (28) Kate and Julia came toddling down the dark stairs at once. Both of them kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be perished alive, and asked was Gabriel with her. (29) is an example of Explanation, in which the second sentence explains why she liked his company. It does not describe a later event, but a state that over-

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laps with the event described by the first sentence. We have a clear intuition such that the second sentence is subordinate to the first one not only temporally, but also in terms of the coherence relation of Explanation. (29) She liked his company. He was full of inconsequential but amusing chatter and Louise had been right when she said that he knew everybody. (30) is an example of Elaboration. The second sentence embellishes the first event with more detail. (30) Moving forward, the woman poured some of the freshly brewed ch’a into their bowls, then the rest into the chung, setting the lid back on. She was a big woman, yet her movements had been precise, almost delicate. Lastly, in (31), a Background relation holds between the two sentences. Although the second sentence neither explains nor elaborates on the first one, it does provide a backdrop in which the event in the first sentence took place. (31) Some two hours later the whole party sat, exhausted and silent, in deckchairs on the terrace of Sven Hjerson’s hotel, sipping half-heartedly at cups of abominable tea and looking without seeing anything at the wide sweep of the Bay of Naples spread out far below them. Jilly Jonathan was pale but had calmed down after the bout of hysterical weeping that had overcome her once they had got her to the hotel. A close correlation exists between the coherence relations in narratives and the foreground vs. background temporal distinction grounded in aspect. Coherence relations can be grouped into the binary categories of those establishing foreground relations, namely, Narration, and those signaling background relations, i.e., Explanation, Elaboration, Background, Parallel, and Contrast. Many computational linguists also postulate a binary distinction in discourse relations. Hobbs (1979) divides them into two classes: Temporal sequence and Cause move the discourse along, whereas Elaboration, Parallel, and Contrast expand the discourse in place. Grosz and Sidner (1986) postulate Dominance and Satisfaction-precedence as the two most important structural relations. Polanyi (2008) considers Coordination and Subordination to be basic types of structures. Note that in the narrative examples above, the coherence relation of Narration is inferred between foreground sentences, which are made up of telic event descriptions, propelling the narrative time forward. On the other hand, coherence relations such as Explanation and Background are established

narrative structure

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by the background sentences, such as states, modal, and pluperfect, which do not trigger a narrative progression but maintain the given time in the narrative. As we saw in (25) above, which is repeated in (32), sometimes two simple past event sentences can stand in an Elaboration relation. (32) When the cab drew up before the hotel, Gabriel jumped out and, in spite of Mr. Bartell D’Arcy’s protest, paid the driver. He gave the man a shilling over his fare. In this case, no temporal progression is observed. However, this does not counter the claim that aspectual classes determine the foreground and background since the Elaboration event is not a distinct event that can follow the event in the prior sentence. It is instead part of it and thus must be temporally included in it. 3.2 Inferences about Coherence Relations Speakers have communicative intentions that far exceed the literal meaning of sentences, making their comprehension an equally inferential process of retrieving and reconstructing those intentions from the literal meaning (Grice, 1989). Despite the fact that coherence relations are rarely explicitly marked, we nonetheless effortlessly perceive them, organizing discourse into a systematic structure and establishing the most natural inter-clausal dependencies. Similar to the native speaker’s implicit knowledge of grammar, it is even argued that such an inferential process is automatic and does not require conscious reasoning (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). Consider an often-cited example in (33) from Hobbs (1979). We do not perceive (33a) as merely a list of two separate facts about John but as related statements. The second sentence, which is a background state, is thematically connected to the first, providing a reason for him to go to Istanbul (Explanation). (33b) is awkward since we cannot easily establish such a causal relation. Due to our assumption that (33b) must be coherent, we might still try to relate the two clauses by asking whether Istanbul is wellknown for good spinach. (33) a. John took the train from Paris to Istanbul. He has family there. b. John took the train from Paris to Istanbul. ?He likes spinach. What aspects of the discourse in (33a) above give clues about coherence? Where does our ability to easily discern coherence come from? This ability obviously derives from the strong assumption that a narrative is coherent (fol-

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lowing from Gricean cooperative principle of communication),4 together with our cognitive system of reasoning and inferring. As we have discussed, discourse relations such as Narration, Explanation, Elaboration, etc., have been proposed to explain coherence (Asher and Lascarides, 2003; Hobbs, 1979, 1990; Kehler, 2002; Mann and Thompson, 1988). It has also been argued that a coherent text must address a discourse topic (Question Under Discussion, the author’s intention) and should not digress from it (Giora, 1985; Grosz and Sidner, 1986). Applied to narratives, coherent narratives would address the QUD ‘What happened (next)?’, describing a series of events that constitute the plot and match the textual order. Mann and Thompson (1986) argue that the coherence relations, although not explicit, are still part of what is said, using the following examples and tests. First, adding the denial of the inference in (34b) makes the discourse incoherent. (34) a. I’ll give you a free tour of the development. My phone number is 555– 9876. b. #But calling that phone number won’t help you to get the tour. Second, making the inference explicit as in (35b) is redundant, destroying the coherence of the narrative. (35) a. I went hitchhiking in Norway. Nobody would pick me up. b. #It was in Norway that nobody would pick me up. Third, the felicity conditions (Searle, 1969, pp. 66–67) must be met for the inference drawn from (35), as illustrated in (36). The preparatory condition 1 in (36a) supports the asserted proposition, and the preparatory condition 2 in (36b) makes the assertion informative. If the sincerity condition in (36c) is not met, the assertion becomes deceptive. If the hearer thinks that any of these conditions are not satisfied, the discourse becomes incoherent and anomalous.

4 Grice (1975) proposed that conversation is regulated by the principle of cooperation between speaker and hearer, which he calls maxims, to achieve the purpose of their conversation. The definitions of Gricean maxims are given in (i). (i) The Gricean maxim of cooperation a. Quantity: be only as informative as required for current conversational purposes. b. Quality: say only what you believe true. c. Relation: be relevant. d. Manner: be brief and orderly and avoid obscurity and ambiguity.

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(36) a. S has evidence that it was in Norway that nobody would pick him/her up if anyone wants to hear it. b. It is not obvious that the hearer already knows that it was in Norway that nobody would pick the speaker up. c. The speaker believes that it was in Norway that nobody would pick him/her up. Finally, these inferences are subject to the same kind of social responsibility as asserted propositions are. For example, just like we cannot say ‘it is raining’ when the sky is clear outside, if we continue (34a) with (34b), we may be charged with being misleading or deceptive. In contrast to the clear intuitions about coherence relations in discourse, there is a lot of disagreement in the field about how to theorize them. Existing theories can be divided largely into three groups depending on their theoretical orientation: Pragmatic theories such as Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST, Mann and Thompson, 1986); semantic theories such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT, Asher and Lascarides, 2003); and computational theories such as Centering Theory (Grosz and Sidner, 1986), Linguistic Discourse Model (LDM, Polanyi, 1996) and abduction (Hobbs et al., 1993). Semantic theories take linguistic forms seriously (compositional), and yet meaning-based. They differ from computational theories, which are either purely form-based (e.g., Centering Theory) or do not distinguish between language and world knowledge/general cognition. Purely structural analyses, such as Grosz and Sidner’s Centering Theory, contains insufficient semantic and discourse-contextual information. Computational theories like Hobbs’ (Hobbs, 1979, 1985, Hobbs et al., 1993) assume a highly un-modular architecture: In his system, any piece of information from any knowledge source can be accessed at any time. Asher and Lascarides (2003) argue against such a non-modular view of meaning, stressing that information from grammar and from world knowledge must be separated because understanding what is being said is possible without having complete world knowledge to be able to evaluate it as true or false. Semantic theories are also different from pragmatic theories, which do not assume compositionality but instead believe that there is no direct correspondence between linguistic form and what is conveyed (illocutionary force).5 While semantic theories have solid formalization tools based on model5 The illocutionary force indicates the speaker’s intention for communication that is conventionally associated with the locutionary force (what is said, the denotational meaning of a sentence), such as declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentence forces as well as socially determined speech acts such as threatening, promising, etc.

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theoretic semantics and (default) logic to provide an algorithmic analysis of discourse, pragmatic theories do not employ such tools and hence remain at a largely descriptive-level. For example, the definitions for discourse relations in RST are not precise enough, and thus the same discourse segment can satisfy multiple definitions. Let us look at a semantic theory of the coherence inference more closely. Asher and Lascarides (2003) argue that coherence inferences are defeasible (i.e., non-monotonic) rules that rely on extralinguistic world knowledge and commonsense reasoning, as controlled by rules in (37). |~ is a non-monotonic consequence relation. (37) a. A > B means A then normally B. b. Defeasible modus ponens: A > B, A |~ B (i.e., A supports B; B can be concluded from A). Let us observe how the rules in (37) are utilized to calculate the coherence relations. (38) shows the basic schema: If β is to be attached to α with a coherence relation and the result is labeled λ, and information Info (α, β, λ) about α, β and λ holds, then normally, the rhetorical connection is R. (38) (? (α, β, λ) ∧ Info (α, β, λ)) > R(α, β, λ) They argue that the coherence relation is inferred via commonsense reasoning with domain knowledge. Info(α, β, λ) expresses information retrieved from rich knowledge sources (world knowledge, cognitive states, linguistic resources, etc.). (39) presents the calculation of some concrete coherence relations. If α and β are events of certain kinds that satisfy the scriptal knowledge, then Occasion (α, β) is normally inferred. If α occasions β, then normally the relation is Narration. Explanation (α, β) is inferred when there is evidence in the discourse that β caused α, i.e., CauseD (β, α). (39) a. (? (α, β, λ) ∧ occasion(α, β)) > Narration(α, β) b. (? (α, β, λ) ∧ causeD(β, α)) > Explanation(α, β) If coherence inferences are purely defeasible inferences based on world knowledge, it is hard to explain why they behave like a part of assertion. As we have observed in (34) and (35) above, they are not easily cancellable or reinforceable. They might belong to a different sphere of meaning, namely, Conventional Implicature (CI, Potts, 2005). Instead of treating them as being outside of the truth condition, however, I will include them as part of the mental represen-

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tation of the hearer by explicitly encoding the relations in my Perspectival Discourse Representation Structures (PDRSs) in Chapter 3. In fact, this is what SDRT does, too. 3.3 Referential Linking and Coherence The term ‘cohesion’ is sometimes used to refer to the local connectedness of adjacent sentences in discourse, while coherence pertains to a more global constraint on the well-formedness of a narrative (Brown and Yule, 1983; Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Reinhart, 1980; Taboada, 2004; Tanskanen, 2006). Cohesion is typically achieved by referential linking, i.e., the use of a pronoun or anaphor referring back to an NP introduced in the preceding clause, ellipsis, as well as explicit connectives (e.g., but, and, therefore, etc.).6 It has recently been brought to light that even local cohesion (e.g., referential linking) crucially depends on the larger discourse structure and overall coherence requirements. Grosz and Sidner (1986) argue that attentional state influences the choice of referential form in discourse. Asher and Lascarides (2003) observe that anaphoric dependency is affected by rhetorical relations. Stojnic et al. (2017) show that what determines prominence, which is required for the use of pronouns, is discourse structure. Asher and Lascarides’ (2003) analysis is worth discussing in more detail. They argue that pronoun resolution is affected by rhetorical relations, citing (40) as an example. (40f) is awkward because it is intended to refer to salmon but the anaphoric link is impossible despite the fact that there are no blocking expressions such as every or not between (40c) and (40f). (40) a. b. c. d. e. f.

John had a lovely evening. He had a great meal. He ate salmon. He devoured lots of cheese. He won a dancing competition. #It was a beautiful pink.

Asher and Lascarides (2003) use their rhetorical relations to explain the infelicity of (40f). Figure 4 shows the discourse structure of (40) in a graphic form. Elaboration connects two clauses in a subordination relation whereas Narration builds a coordination structure (Asher, 1993; Hobbs, 1990; Polanyi et al., 6 There is vast literature on discourse adverbs/connectives, which I will not discuss in this book. See Das and Taboada (2013), Fischer (2014), Sanders and Stukker (2012), and Txurruka (2003), inter alia, for some recent studies.

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The discourse structure of (40)

2003). Asher and Lascarides (2003) argue that the resulting structure affects anaphora resolutions. Following many scholars (Grosz and Sidner 1986; Polanyi 1985, inter alia), they postulate the ‘right frontier constraint’, which prevents a new clause from attaching to any arbitrary position in discourse, instead requiring it to attach either the last node entered to the graph or one of the nodes that dominate the last node. Since the last node is usually located on the right of the structure, the nodes to which a new clause can attach are on the ‘right frontier’ of the discourse graph or SDRS. For example, in Figure 4, John had a lovely evening and He won a dance competition are in the right frontier. This constraint blocks it in (40f) from binding to salmon since (40c) is not on the right frontier when (40f) is introduced. The possible ways of continuing the discourse in (40) are thus constrained by the overall discourse structure. The possibilities are limited to elaborating on the dance competition or to introducing a new event parallel to either John having a lovely evening or him winning the dance competition. Consider another example from Asher and Lascarides (2003) given in (41). In this discourse, a demonstrative pronoun this refers to a proposition rather than an entity. (41) a. One plaintiff was passed over for promotion three times. b. Another didn’t get a raise for five years. c. A third plaintiff was given a lower wage compared to males who were doing the same work. d. But the jury didn’t believe this. As was the case in (41), the possible interpretation of this is constrained by the discourse structure, given in Figure 5. The clauses in (41a–c) form Continuation relations, which states that under normal circumstances the current clause continues to describe the same topic as the preceding clause does (Asher and Lascarides, 2003). What is noteworthy here is that we can easily draw an inference about the implicit topic (three plaintiffs made three claims that they were ill-treated) and understand the con-

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figure 5

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The discourse structure of (41)

tinuation segments as elaborating on this linguistically implicit topic. Observing the right frontier constraint, this can only refer to the last claim in (41c) or to the sum of all three claims, referred to as the superordinate topic. The fact that pronoun resolution is affected by coherence relations has received renewed attention in Stojnic, Stone and Lepore (2017), who propose a semantic analysis of pronouns called the Attention–Coherence Approach. Their anaphor resolution system consists of a ranking of candidate interpretations according to relative prominence (attention) and implicit mechanisms affecting this ranking (coherence). They argue that pronouns, as a matter of their semantics, invariably select the top-ranked candidate in the current attentional state, which is managed by linguistically triggered conventional discourse coherence rules. Prominence in a discourse is modeled by viewing assignments as stacks as in computer science. For example, the indefinite NP a man in (42) introduces a new unspecified top-ranked individual at the center of attention, demoting all other candidates one position down in terms of ordering on the prominence stack. The meaning of the pronoun he is the entity that is at the center of attention, which is a man. (42) A man walked in. He sat down. Often times, a clause contains more than one pronoun, raising the question of the order of resolution. Stojnic et al. (2017), like Kehler (2002), argue that the parallel discourse structure (event clauses connected via Narration) is reflected in a parallel grammatical relation, resolving he to John and him to Tim (i.e., subject to subject and object to object) in (43a).7 Different discourse relations, on the other hand, do not require a parallel grammatical relation. In (43b), in which an Explanation relation holds, he refers to the object, Tim.8 Stojnic et al. 7 Stojnic et al. (2017) report that the preference of the subject NP over the object as an antecedent for a pronoun in parallel structures is well established by existing corpus and psycholinguistic studies (Bittner, 2014; Kameyama, 1996; Walker et al., 1994). 8 Asher and Lascarides (2003) note that discourse (43b) is also a counterexample to theories of anaphora which utilize only grammatical information; for example, Centering Theory (Grosz et al., 1995) predicts that he binds to John since antecedents in the subject position are preferred to those in the object position.

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(2017), like Asher and Lascarides (2003), introduces rhetorical relations such as Narration and Explanation in their logical representation of discourse to explain the most natural anaphoric links. (43) John got disappointed with Tim. a. He fired him. b. He did sloppy work. We have so far observed that anaphora resolution is significantly affected by the hierarchical discourse structure, and there are constraints (e.g., right frontier constraint) that limit the possible ways that a coherent discourse can continue (Asher and Lascarides, 2003). I argue that the right frontier constraint holds because pronouns refer to the most salient antecedent, which must be in the immediately preceding sentence or its immediately superordinate sentence. In Stojnic et al.’s system (2017) pronouns refer to the top-ranked candidate on the stack representing the reader’s attentional state, where the prominence ranking itself is determined by discourse structure. I further argue that the highest superordinate sentence demarcates an episode boundary. Assuming this, we expect that pronouns will not normally be used across episode boundaries. As descriptive studies of discourse have well-documented, an old referent is often re-introduced using a proper name or a definite NP across episode boundaries (Ariel, 1988, 1990; Gundel et al. 1993; Prince, 1992). Given the discussion so far, it seems obvious that anaphoric resolution is not simply a structural matter as traditional syntactic theories assume (e.g., Chomsky’s (1981) Binding Theory), but also a discourse matter. To summarize Chapter 2, I have defined narratives as a representation of a series of connected events in which a verbal sequence of clauses matches the order in which those events take place and have examined their fundamental structure and organization. The nucleus of narratives is divided into episodes, self-contained sub-parts with the same time, location, characters, and events. The foreground and background of narratives, which are determined by lexical and grammatical aspects, require different temporal and coherence relations. It is typically the case in narratives that a series of foregrounded events stand in more or less an equal status with one another, whereas background states are perceived as subordinate to the narrated events, resulting in a hierarchical discourse structure similar to the hierarchical sentence structure. Foreground materials move the narrative time forward, answering the QUD ‘What happened (next)?’, and they are connected to other foreground events in terms of Narration. On the other hand, background maintains the same temporal reference, connected to foreground events via other coherence relations such as

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Explanation, Background, and Elaboration. Coherence relations play a significant role in controlling anaphora resolutions and possible ways in which a narrative discourse can continue. The temporal and coherence inferences that we discussed in this chapter derive from the formal features of the narrative discourse, such as aspectual classes of the predicate. For this reason, I claimed that these inferences are logical, but as previously mentioned, a consensus in the literature has yet to be reached. Some scholars argue that they are defeasible inferences based on pragmatic and world knowledge and thus not logically valid (e.g., Dowty, 1986; Asher and Lascarides, 2003). In my view, this conclusion was inevitable because the previous accounts did not acknowledge the fundamental processing difference between narrative and conversational discourse types, treating them in the same manner. In narratives, in which the temporal order matches the textual order, temporal inferences are drawn from aspectual classes of the predicates and grammatical aspects, which are systematic, predictable, and thus conventional. There are hosts of other inferences and conclusions that can be drawn from much richer background cultural knowledge and vastly diverse individual experiences, which are not necessarily logical, albeit reasonable and rational. As Abbot (2008) points out, we often over-read or under-read narratives, filling in the gaps, resulting at times in completely different interpretations of the same narrative. Understanding and interpreting a story, as well as adapting it across media and language, can be processes of reconstruction and invention in their own right. These interpretative processes that imbue the narrative with rich meaning are not covered in this book, whose goal is to delineate the logical aspect that is more or less stable across different interpretations and that lends itself to a consistent formal analysis. My hope is that the logical inferences and the systematic mechanism for drawing them that are studied in some rigor in this book will mark a beginning for formal semantic and pragmatic analyses of the richer and more varied inferences we customarily draw in the process of interpreting a narrative.

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The Theoretical Toolkit 1

Dynamic Semantics

1.1 Context Dependency of Linguistic Expressions The use of language does not occur in a vacuum but instead depends on both the actual situation in which something is uttered (speech/utterance context) and the linguistic context accumulated from previous sentences in discourse. This inherent context-dependency is simplified and downplayed in traditional model theoretic semantics, which is restricted to the analysis of isolated sentences and which equates meaning with truth conditions (i.e., the conditions under which a sentence/proposition is true or false). Truth-conditional semantics is built on the premise of the objectivity and the totality of information. It seems obvious, however, that in natural contexts, only partial and often very limited information is available as a basis for human reasoning. Naturally produced discourse could never supply information on everything that is true in reality; at most it describes merely a small slice of that reality. Furthermore, a discourse is a structured object that is constructed and processed by a cognitive agent from a certain temporal vantage point. Hence, a particular conclusion may be valid at one point, but invalid at another. In other words, the standard preservation of the assumed truth from premises through conclusion does not apply; the conclusion describes a different event from the premises, because temporal reference has likely shifted. Various temporal and coherence inferences drawn during the interpretation of a discourse are thus inherently situated, because they depend on perspectives that change dynamically as the discourse unfolds. To reflect this more realistic view of meaning in language, the focus in semantics has shifted during the 1980s away from an approach that views the meaning solely as the condition under which a sentence is true, which is abstracted from the discourse context, toward a more dynamic approach with special emphasis on context-dependent interpretation. Focusing on the description of partial information structures, which are constantly changing in the incremental process of information updating, dynamic semantics takes the meaning of a sentence as its ‘context-change potential’, i.e., the manner in which a new sentence contributes to the given body of information. This allows dynamic semantics to incorporate context-dependency, which has often been relegated to pragmatics, within a precise and coherent account of context updates.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423343_004

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1.2 Nominal Anaphora The claim that static truth-conditional semantics is inadequate for analyzing natural language requires some elaboration. The tool employed in static truthconditional semantics is Intensional Predicate Calculus (IPC, see L.T.F. Gamut 1991 for an introduction). In this system, the truth-value is calculated as a function from world-time indices to denotations in a model. In IPC, NP s are translated into quantifiers, and pronouns are treated as variables that are bound by them. In ordinary IPC, the scope of a quantifier is limited to the formula in which it occurs as its main operator. Consider the following discourse from Gamut (1991). (1) A man comes in. He sees a dog. He smiles. The first two sentences in (1) have the following logical translation in IPC observing the principle of compositionality.1 (2) ∃x(man(x) ∧ come-in(x)) ∧ ∃y(dog(y) ∧ see(x, y)) (2) cannot be correct, however, since the second occurrence of x is not bound by the existential quantifier ∃x. The correct translation should be (3). (3) ∃x(man(x) ∧ come-in(x) ∧ ∃y(dog(y) ∧ see(x, y))) The problem is that, unlike (2), (3) is not produced in a compositional manner from (2), since rearranging the brackets is not an operation that has a corresponding semantic interpretation. Similarly, the full discourse cannot be translated into IPC formula unless we undo the previous results and reopen the discourse to obtain (4). (4) ∃x(man(x) ∧ come-in(x) ∧ ∃y(dog(y) ∧ see(x, y)) ∧ smile(x)) Therefore, the interpretation cannot proceed step-by-step in IPC, although interpretation is an incremental process (Gamut, 1991). The lesson to be learned is that in discourse, the informational content is as important as the truth conditional content. The fact that truth conditional equivalence does not guarantee informational equivalence is clearly demonstrated in (5). The first sen-

1 The compositionality principle (a.k.a., Frege’s principle) states that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its parts and the way they are put together.

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tences in (5a) and (5b) are truth conditionally equivalent. However, only (5a) is an acceptable discourse. (5) a. A man comes in. He smiles. b. Not every man does not come in. #He smiles. Another often-discussed example regarding the difficulty IPC faces for the natural language NP interpretation is Geach’s donkey sentences, given in (6). The existential quantifier a donkey is embedded in the relative clause modifying the subject, failing to c-command the pronoun it that it is supposed to bind. (6) [Every farmer who owns a donkey] beats it. (7a) is an IPC formula representing (6). Again, the last occurrences of x and y are free in this formula and thus does not capture the intended meaning. Note further that the existential quantifier a donkey has to be interpreted as a universal quantifier. Consider a situation where a farmer owns multiple donkeys but beats only one of them. In this situation, the sentence would be false. The correct translation, then, should be (7b). However, there is no easy method of deriving (7b) from (6) compositionally in a principled manner. (7) a. ∃x(farmer(x) ∧ ∃y(donkey(y) ∧ own(x, y))) → beat(x, y) b. ∀x(farmer(x) → ∀y((donkey(y) ∧ own(x, y)) → beat(x, y))). In IPC, meaning is basically the set of all assignments on some given set of variables. As long as there is a man in the domain of discourse entering some specified place, then a man comes in is true, and there is no way of picking out the man introduced by the sentence simply by looking at this set of assignments. What we need is a way to keep track of the man introduced by the assignment function. This is precisely what dynamic semantics does. In Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, Kamp and Reyle, 1993), discourse referents keep track of individuals that are introduced in prior discourse. In File Change Semantics (FCS, Heim, 1983), files keep the records of individuals and their properties. In Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL, Groenedijk and Stokhof, 1991), input and output assignment functions perform this role. 1.3 Temporal Anaphora Static semantics uses tense logic for specifying the truth conditions for tensed sentences. Tense logic relies on tense operators (Prior, 1967) and the ontology of temporal instants or intervals (Bennett and Partee, 1972; Montague, 1973).

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There are two operators, F and P, which are to be read as ‘it will at some point in the future be the case that’ and ‘it was at some point in the past the case that,’ respectively. Tensed formulas are defined as follows. (8) a. Fφ at t is true iff. there is t′ such that t < t′ and φ is true at t′ b. Pφ at t is true iff. there is t′ such that t′ < t and φ is true at t′ Partee (1984) shows the inadequacy of temporal operator analyses of tense using her often-cited example in (9), in which the tense and the negation interact in terms of scope relations. (9) I didn’t turn off the stove. The sentence cannot mean that in any past time, there was no event of turning off the stove, which is the negation wide-scope interpretation in (10a). Nor does it mean that there was a time in the past that the speaker did not turn off the stove, which is the existential past tense wide-scope interpretation in (10b). Instead, (9) means that, at a particular and contextually salient time in the past, the speaker failed to turn off the stove. (10) a. ¬∃t[t < now ∧ turn off(I, the stove)] b. ∃t[t < now ∧ ¬turn off(I, the stove)] Therefore, the past tense is better treated as a pronoun referring back to a contextually salient reference time, rather than an operator quantifying over temporal instants or intervals. Just like the pronoun he in (11a) refers back to Sam in the previous sentence, the past tense in the second clause in (11b) refers to the time at which the event described by the first clause happened, i.e., Sam got drunk when Sheila had a party. However, tense logic cannot establish any anaphoric connection between the two past tenses. (11) a. Sam is married. He has three children. b. Sheila had a party, and Sam got drunk. (Partee, 1984) Natural language tenses often determine the time of the described situation with the help of temporal adverbials, as illustrated in (12). (12) John went to school yesterday. The operator analysis of tense causes a problem here, too. Assuming that the adverb yesterday introduces an operator Y, neither PY(go to school(john)) nor

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YP (go to school(john)) correctly represent the truth condition of (9) since these formulas make the sentence true when the event of John going to school occurred sometime before yesterday.2 Furthermore, natural language tensed sentences often cannot be evaluated at moments of time, as the tense logic imposes. Consider (13). (13) a. Mary is sleeping. b. Mary is writing a letter. Mary is sleeping at t is true if and only if Mary belongs to the extension at t of asleep. However, it is difficult to set up the model such that at the instant or the interval t Mary and a letter have the ‘write’ relation. The event-based approach (Davidson, 1967) argues that verbs select an event argument as well as individual argument(s), offering a natural solution to this problem. (12b) is true if and only if the event of her writing temporally includes t. Event semantics also takes care of the (multiple) adverbial problem in (12). As shown in (14), in which e is an event argument, p is a location argument, and t is a time argument, each adverbial can be freely conjoined to the logical translation and existentially closed. (14) Mary wrote a letter in the bathroom at midnight. ∃e∃x∃p∃t(writing(e, Mary, x) ∧ letter(x) ∧ bathroom(p) ∧ midnight(t) ∧ in(e, p) ∧ at(e, t)) The various limitations of static semantics discussed so far have led semanticists to adopt a dynamic view of meaning. In the next section, I will describe in detail a dynamic semantic framework, Discourse Representation Theory, which I adopt for the purpose of logically analyzing narratives.

2 To solve this problem, Dowty (1979) proposes the AT operator, assigning (12) the logical form: ∃t[t < now ∧ AT(t, t ⊆ yesterday, go to school(john))]. However, since Dowty’s (1979) system generates a tensed sentence only when a tense-less sentence combines with an adverbial, he must posit special rules to produce tensed sentences with no adverbial. For example, John smiled is produced with a rule that combines a tense-less sentence, John smile, with an adverbial at some past time, which does not surface. The system also has difficulty with multiple adverbials. Since combining an adverbial with a tense-less sentence necessarily produces an existentially closed formula, no additional adverbial can be added on to it. Moreover, since adverbs must combine with tense morphemes to give the right structures, temporal adverbials, like today and on Sunday, that are compatible with different tenses must belong to multiple categories, which is not parsimonious.

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Discourse Representation Theory

2.1 Classic Discourse Representation Theory Among the many dynamic semantic frameworks, Discourse Representation Theory (henceforth DRT) has been developed as a dynamic toolkit to account for nominal and temporal anaphora in discourse. Although DRT has been criticized for being mentalistic and not compositional, converting classic DRT to compositional DRT is not difficult (see Muskens, 1996). Viewing interpretation as a mental representation of the interpreter accords with my view of meaning, so DRT will be the formal tool adopted in this book. DRT regards semantic interpretation not as a direct relation between expressions and (a model of) reality, but as mediated by an intermediate level of semantic representation called Discourse Representation Structure (henceforth DRS) where the information conveyed by a discourse is stored.3 A DRS may be regarded as a partial description of reality, representing the receiver’s understanding of a discourse. Discourse representations are also dynamic in order to reflect the dynamic nature of discourse; in a sequence of sentences, new entities are added, old entities are referred to, and their properties as well as situations change over time in the receiver’s mental representation. This concept of meaning differs from the familiar concept of the interpretation of an expression in a model that presents a complete picture of reality. This more familiar level of semantic interpretation, however, still exists in DRT, in the form of the definition of the truth of a discourse. The truth of a discourse in a model is defined in terms of whether the partial information represented by its discourse representation can be embedded in a complete model. As such, DRT reconciles the psycho-linguistic or procedural view of meaning, in which the meaning of an expression is to be regarded as an instruction to the hearer to construct a mental representation, and the logico-semantic or declarative view, which equates meaning with denotation conditions (Hamm et al., 2006; Smith, 2003). DRT has the potential to bridge the gap between these two divergent perspectives on meaning, alleviating the growing tension between formal semantics and cognitive semantics.

3 Unlike the intermediate level in the orthodox truth-conditional semantic framework, Montague Grammar, the corresponding level of discourse representation (i.e., DRS) in DRT is an essential component of the grammar and thus indispensable. In Montague Grammar, expressions of the system of Intensional Logic (IL), into which syntactic structures are translated, are there for mere convenience, being eliminable because of the strict compositionality of the translation process.

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Let us observe how DRT semantically represents a discourse. A DRS for a tensed discourse includes events, states, and location times as objects in the universe of discourse, specifying relations of precedence and inclusion among them. The eventuality described by a non-initial sentence e is interpreted as related temporally to some other event e′ introduced by the preceding discourse context. If e′ is an event, then e is typically understood as following the event e′. This case is illustrated by the second sentence of (15a). When the second sentence is interpreted, the event of a man coming in is the last mentioned. And the new event, that of him sitting down, is naturally seen as following the event of his entering. If e is a state, on the other hand, the relation is typically that of overlap. This is the case for the second sentence of (15b). From (15b), it is inferred that the man was happy when, not after, he came in. (15) a. A man came in. He sat down. b. A man came in. He was happy. (16) is the DRS for (15a). (16) A man came in. He sat down.

A DRS K is a set of discourse referents x1, …, xn (universe of K) and a set of DRS conditions C1, …, Cn, which are separated from each other by the line at the top. In (16), n is the utterance time, x < y means x temporally precedes y, and x ⊆ y means x is temporally included in y. The first sentence of (15a) introduces an event discourse referent e of a man coming in, which is included in its location time t. The location time precedes the utterance time n. Kamp and Reyle (1993) adopt Reichenbach’s (1947) notion of Reference time/point (Rpt) by introducing into the DRS a condition of the form Rpt: = α, where α is some discourse

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referent for a time or an event already present in the DRS. More specifically, Rpt is the discourse referent (variable) representing the event described by the most recent past tense event sentence. If there is no such sentence, DRT lets the Rpt equal some new arbitrary time. The second sentence of (15a) adds the condition Rpt: = e, meaning that e is a reference point for the second sentence. The second sentence describes an event, and thus the relation between this event and the reference point is succession. In a discourse-level formal framework like DRT, an inter-sentential binding without structural relations like c-command poses no problem. If there is a pronoun in DRS in a subsequent sentence, it introduces a new discourse referent on its own, but the discourse referent must be equated with an already existing discourse referent in DRS. There are certain structural restrictions (called ‘accessibility’) on what existing discourse referent a pronoun can be equated with.4 A pronoun must find an antecedent that is accessible from the position it is introduced. In (16), the discourse referent y is equated with the existing discourse referent x, establishing the anaphoric relationship between a man and he. We have observed in the previous section the problem involved with treating indefinites as quantifiers with an existential force (e.g., donkey anaphora). In DRT, an indefinite like a man is not treated as an existential quantifier; it simply introduces a discourse referent and the quantifying force it seems to engender instead comes from the surrounding environment. If an indefinite is introduced in the main DRS, the quantifying effect is existential due to the text-level existential closure deriving from the definition of the embedding function (i.e., a DRS is verified in a model M if and only if there exists an embedding function that verifies it in M). If it is introduced in the antecedent of a conditional or under the scope of the universal quantifier every, as in donkey sentences, the quantifying effect will be

4 Accessibility is a relation between DRS s for which the conditions in (i) hold. In a nutshell, a discourse referent from a superordinate DRS is accessible to a pronoun in subordinate DRS. The accessibility falls out naturally from the semantics of DRS rather than being stipulated. For example, a man is accessible to he in (15a) because every embedding that makes the second sentence true is an extension of an embedding function that verifies the first sentence, maintaining the same assignment to the discourse referent for a man. Given two embedding functions f and g, which are partial mappings from discourse referents to individuals, and a DRS K, g extends f with respect to K, or f[K]g, iff. Dom(g)= Dom(f) ∪ UK, and for all x in Dom(f): f(x) = g(x). (i) a. ¬K′, then K is accessible to K′ b. K′ ∨ K″, then K is accessible to K′ and K″ c. K′ ⇒ K″, then K is accessible to K′ and K′ is accessible to K″ d. K′ (∀x)K″, then K is accessible to K′ and K′ is accessible to K″

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universal because a condition of the form K ⇒ K′ is verified in M if and only if every embedding function verifying K can be extended to a function that verifies K′. Unlike (15a), the second sentence in (15b) is a state, so its location time is included in the state. The DRS for (15b) is given in (17). The interpretation of the state sentence will again require the choice of a reference time, which is the event described by the first sentence e. Since the second sentence describes a state, it includes the reference point. As in (16), the pronoun he introduces a discourse referent y, which is equated with the discourse referent for a man, x. (17) A man came in. He was happy.

The DRSs thus constructed are true if and only if there is an embedding function f which associate individuals in the model with the discourse referents in the DRS in such a way that the descriptive conditions that the DRS contains are satisfied by the corresponding individuals in the model (see the definition of satisfaction 1.5.8 in Kamp and Reyle, 1993, p. 136). 2.2 Segmented DRT The classic DRT only encodes purely temporal relations and lacks a means to specify coherence relations. Asher and Lascarides’ (2003) propose Segmented DRT (SDRT) to incorporate them. SDRT introduces discourse referents for speech acts, π1, …, πn, and requires that a new information be attached to the speech act referent of the last clause in the preceding discourse with a particular coherence relation. Observe an example of SDRS from Asher and Lascarides’ (2003) in (18). The temporal relation between eπ1 and eπ2 is not explicitly encoded in (18) but instead follows from the semantics of Explanation(π1, π2), which entails Cause(eπ2, eπ1). The causal relation in turn entails the temporal precedence relation.

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(18) Max fell. John pushed him.

2.3 Structured/Layered DRT Both classic DRT and SDRT only represent linguistic input. Maier (2006, 2009) and Hunter (2013) propose the structured or Layered DRS where the topmost DRS K0 encodes the utterance (extralinguistic) context, which contains variables for the speaker x, the speech time t, the speech location l, and the actual world w. The sentence I am speaking is represented in the structured DRS in (19). Ag(x) means that x is the agent (i.e., the speaker) of the utterance context. (19) K0

The reason why we need a special treatment of the speaker, the speech time, etc. is that the interpretation of indexical expressions such as I, you, here and now depends on context of use rather than world-time indices. Lewis (1979) proposes to add speaker, addressee, and place indices to world and time indices in a model. However, his multiple index system cannot distinguish between (20a), which is not valid, and (20b), which is valid. (20) a. Necessarily, I am here now. b. I am here now. To avoid this problem, Kaplan (1989) treats the interpretation as a two-step process from the utterance context to intension. First, the interpretation function applies to any constant and yields its character, which applies to context and yields its content. The content (intension) then applies to world-time pairs and

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gives the extension of the expression. Kaplan’s two-stage interpretation system predicts that an indexical will not be affected by intensional operators. For example, I in the embedded clause in (21) still refers to the actual speaker, not to John. (21) John said that I am a fool. Parallel to I, the present and the future tenses have to be interpreted in relation to the time of utterance even when they occur within the syntactic scope of other tenses, as illustrated by Kamp’s (1971) example in (22b). (22) a. A child was born which would rule the world. b. A child was born which will rule the world.5 The structured DRT propose a somewhat different treatment of indexicals than the classic Kaplanian analysis. Hunter and Asher (2005) and Hunter (2013) treat rigidity of indexicals not as their lexical meaning but as their presuppositions. They introduce two operators, ↑ and ⇑, which restrict a particular resolution strategy for the presupposition of an indexical in their scope. ⇑ is a strict operator that demands that the presupposition of an indexical in its scope must be resolved in the most global DRS. This operator was posited for English I, which seems to invariably receive a Kaplanian reading. ↑ requires material in its scope to be resolved in the most global context whenever possible, also permitting a resolution in a lower context. ↑ takes scope over indexicals such as now, actual, actually and here, whose presuppositions can sometimes interact with the contents of other expressions in a discourse. As pointed out by Maier (2006, 2009), however, the wide scope of indexicals imposed by ⇑ and ↑ does not ensure their rigid interpretation. (23a) and (23b), for instance, do not have the same meaning ((23a) is contingent and (23b) is a tautology); yet no scope relation is involved in this case as they are simple sentences. (23) a. I am speaking. b. The speaker is speaking.

5 To capture the difference between (22a) and (22b), Kamp (1971) proposes now operator N. The logical translations of (22) in this system are given in (i). (i) a. P∃x(child(x) ∧ born(x) ∧ F rule(x)) b. P∃x(child(x) ∧ born(x) ∧ NF rule(x))

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Moreover, Hunter and Asher (2005) treat all definite NP s, including definite descriptions, as presuppositional, requiring that the presuppositions of both I in (23a) and the speaker in (23b) resolved in the most global context. If so, (23a) and (23b) will receive the same interpretation, contrary to facts. Maier (2009) returns to Kaplan’s directly referential analysis of indexicals. For directly referential terms, standard DRT uses an external anchor that fixes the referent of an indexical (and a proper name) discourse referent, as shown in (24). (24) I am speaking

The DRS in (24) is true if and only if there is a verifying embedding function that extends the anchor, i.e., if there is an assignment that maps x to the speaker and that verifies the condition of the DRS in w: f verifies (24) in w if and only if (i) f(x) = the speaker (anchor compliance), and (ii) f |=w speak(x) (content verification). That is to say, the sentence is true in w if and only if the actual speaker speaks in w, generating a contingent proposition about a fixed individual. By contrast, the representation of the unanchored descriptive counterpart in (23b) conveys the existential proposition that there is at least one person who is the speaker. Note however that DRSs are purported to be mental representations of the hearer’s interpretation of discourse. The use of anchors, which brings in model-theoretic entities, does not mesh well with the representational nature of DRT. To remove the objection of mixing DRS s and models, Maier proposes Layered DRT (LDRT) containing the fr(egan) layer that carries the truth-conditional content and the k(rikpe-)k(aplan) layer that fixes referents for proper names and indexicals. Discourse referents and conditions are labeled with either fr or kk, ensuring that they are interpreted at the right layer, as illustrated in (25). Since the verification is label-sensitive in LDRT, when the LDRSs in (25) are embedded in a model, the kk content is turned into anchors that restrict the embedding for fr content. (25) a. I am speaking.

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b. The speaker is speaking.

Hunter (2013) objects to Maier’s two-dimensional semantics for its lack of generality and minimality. To remedy the problems of the ↑ and ⇑ operators pointed out by Maier, she adopts pointed models that single out the actual world in which the utterance event is taking place, reflecting the privileged status of the actual context/world K0. The model is of the form ⟨D, I, W, a⟩, where D is a domain of individuals, I is an interpretation function, W is a set of worlds and a ∈ W is a world that serves as the actual world. Because there is an additional layer K0, which represents the utterance context/world, the evaluation of DRS observes the initial information state ⟨a, ga⟩ in which ga is an anchor function for K0, the unique assignment function that satisfies the conditions in K0 given a. In subsequent evaluations of each sub-DRS, Hunter (2013) argues, the assignment to discourse referents in K0 must be carried down. In other words, for a DRS Kn embedded in K0, all admissible assignment functions for Kn are extensions of the anchor function ga. Hunter emphasizes that this treatment is fundamentally different from Kaplanian two-dimensional theory since the existence of the actual world for the evaluation of K0 is exactly the same as the evaluation of any other sub-DRS that requires possible worlds. For example, proceeding from K0 to K1, if a modal or other intensional operator comes across, the set of accessible world-assignment pairs is further restricted to those that comply with the modal force but also observing the initial assignments of the anchor function.

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3.1 Replacing the Utterance Context with Perspective Maier and Hunter’s structured/Layered DRT is a good starting point for my Perspectival DRT not simply because they are the most recent versions of DRT, but they also recognize the importance of the (utterance) context, giving it an explicit representation as a separate DRS layer. While setting aside the topmost DRS, K0, as the context DRS like structured/Layered DRT does, I make a significant alteration by requiring it to be embedded in ‘the most prominent point of view or perspective,’ rather than invariably anchored to the actual utterance context. In fact, I argue that this context only happens to be the utter-

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ance context in a typical everyday communicative exchange of face-to-face conversation. In other discourse types, e.g., narratives, instruction manuals, or recorded messages (Predelli, 1998), where the discourse is in some sense severed from the utterance (production) context, the most prominent perspective may not be the utterance context. Events in discourse are described from a certain point of view due to our physical orientation, psychological and mental dispositions, as well as the inherent situatedness of events. The vantage point, from which the events are observed, described, interpreted, and evaluated is called ‘perspective’. In everyday discourse that linguists typically use for primary data for simplicity and convenience, the perspective is indistinguishable from the utterance context (Doron, 1991; Eckardt, 2014). There are other contexts, however, where the two can be rather clearly differentiated, one of which is the narrative. In narratives, the narrator positions him/herself directly in the referential domain of the story context, telling the story from the perspective of the narrative timeline and the story world. As a result, actual situational features in the production or reception of a narrative do not directly contribute to its interpretation. I claim that the narrator, who is assumed to objectively describe events from a neutral vantage point, is also located in the story world as an (omniscient) observer and mind-reader. I put ‘omniscient’ in the parenthesis because not all third-person narratives are omniscient narrative. Some literary critics reserve the term “omniscient narration” for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. Abbott (2008, p. 73) argues that even for these authors, the narration itself, unlike the omniscient narrator, is not omniscient at all. If that is the case, it further supports my claim that the narrator is situated in the story world with a certain vantage point, albeit more neutral and objective than that of characters, and a lot can be hidden from his/her view. The narrator is more abstract than the material author. The narrator voice ranges from “a mere ‘function of narration’ that can be personalized or as a virtual person whose personhood can be reduced to zero degree” (Quoted in Abbott, 2008, p. 72, attributed to Paul Hernadi, personal communication). In a first-person narrative, the narrator participates in the story as any other characters and refers to him/herself using the first-person pronoun I. In such a case, the narrator is no longer an objective and reliable source but instead someone who chooses, leaves, judges, or even changes the information according to his/her own viewpoint (Abbott, 2008). That is, the narrator and the author/writer of the story are to be clearly distinguished, and I argue that the former, unlike the latter, shares the prominent context with other characters. Barthes (1975, p. 282) emphatically asserted, “The (material) author of a narrative is in no way to be confused with the narrator of that narrative”.

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This more flexible treatment of the context as a general perspective/point of view help solve the recalcitrant puzzle of shifty indexicals. It is considered a distinctive feature of narratives that when a speech/thought of a character is represented, less rigid indexical expressions (now, here, this, etc.) are anchored to the character, not to the narrator. On the other hand, tense and person are adjusted as in indirect discourse to the past tense and the third person. Hence, we see the surprising effect of present and future time indexical cooccurring with the past tense in narratives. An example is given in (26) from D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love quoted in Barfield (1982) and Doron (1991).6 If tomorrow and the past tense were evaluated with respect to the same context, the sentence would be contradictory (Schlenker, 2004). (26) Tomorrow was Monday, Monday, the beginning of another school week! To solve this puzzle, Schlenker (2003) argues that attitude verbs, including implicit speech parentheticals in narratives, can quantify over contexts as well as worlds, shifting the context to that of the character. This move is a major departure from classic treatment of indexicals. As I have discussed, in order to model the rigidity of indexical expressions in attitude reports, Kaplan (1989) proposed a two-stage interpretation process, which has been accepted as the standard analysis. In this system, the value of an indexical is fixed once and for all by the context of utterance and cannot be affected by the logical operators in whose scope it appears. Therefore, context quantifications by attitude verbs are not permitted (Kaplan calls such context quantifying operators “monsters”). Hunter (2013) tries to solve the puzzle of shifty indexicals by abandoning a strict Kaplanian division between context and content, only giving a special status of the utterance context in her pointed model, as we have surveyed. Unlike the aforementioned authors, I maintain the semantic distinction between context and world because they obviously have different properties, behaving independently from each other. Context is the source from which the information comes forth, taking priority over worlds, the latter of which do something different, namely, representing different attitudes toward the given information. However, the context, as I have argued, needs not be limited to the actual utterance context. The production (or reception) time of the narrative is often irrelevant to the interpretation of the narrative, since the entire narrative discourse is interpreted with regard to the narrative context, which is the most

6 What is involved here is so-called Free Indirect Discourse (FID), a style used by the narrator to convey what a character says or thinks. I will discuss FID in detail in Part 3.

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prominent context in this genre. Discourse referents for the coordinates of the most prominent perspective that are introduced in K0 still receive a rigid interpretation in the story context, and will not be manipulated by logical operators. Therefore, indexicals retrieve their denotations from the coordinates of this most prominent point of view, allowing tomorrow in (26) denote the day after the time of the currently described event in the narrative, namely, the event of the character’s thinking, rather than the day after the novel was written or the story was narrated. This means that there is no “shift” of context from the actual utterance context to a narrative context to begin with, since the context is fixed to the narrative context in the first place. The only noted indication of the narrator’s (production) context is the past tense and the third person pronoun, creating an apparent conflict between the future time indexical and the past tense as in (26) above. As I will argue in the next chapter, the tense in narratives is an anaphoric expression, encoding the relationship between location times of the described events on the narrative timeline. Hence, the anterior feature of the past tense is null (Sharvit, 2008) or at most indicates a distance, similar to the past tense in counterfactuals, removing a contradictory nature from (26). The third person pronoun in speech/thought representation is also null, functioning as a disguised I (Sharvit, 2008), as I will argue in Chapter 8. By replacing the rigid utterance context with a more flexible notion of prominent perspective/ point of view, we avoid unnecessary complications of the context shift or unlawful context quantifications by attitude verbs. As such, classic Kaplanian context-content dichotomy is preserved (but with a different notion of context), and the behaviors of indexicals are given a uniform analysis as expressions dependent on the most prominent context; the coordinates of the speech context in non-narrative face-to-face everyday conversations, and to those of the story context in narratives. Moreover, frequent shifts in perspectives in narratives pose no problem because the context prominence is presumed to be constantly changing and being updated in K0 of PDRT. It would be implausible to assume that the context shifts whenever a character’s thought or speech is represented and back to the utterance (production) context of the narrator afterwards, which is against our intuition and also hinders a coherent interpretation of the story. It is important to distinguish between perspective and Free Indirect Discourse, the latter of which is a literary style that the narrator uses to represent what the character says or thinks. The ‘(most prominent) point of view or perspective’ that I described above indicates the former, rather than the latter. Sells (1987) calls it ‘pivot’, the one with respect to whose (space-time) location the content of the proposition is evaluated. Kuno (1987) uses the term ‘empathy’ for the physical point of view and defines it as ‘the speaker’s identification with

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a person/thing that participates in the event or state that he describes’. Kuno (1987) and Zribi-Hertz (1989) appeal to empathy or point-of-view to account for Condition A violations in English reflexives. According to Kuno (1987), (27a) invokes a “camera angle” from across the room so to speak, while (27b) invokes a “camera angle” from the subject’s own viewpoint.7 (27) a. He1 pushed the brandy away from him1. b. He1 pushed the brandy away from himself1. More recently, Hinterwimmer (2017) also emphasized the need to distinguish between viewpoint shift and FID. Sells’ pivot or Kuno’s empathy is sometimes called ‘focalization’ in literary studies (Abbott, 2008). Treating the perspective along this line takes care of the problem of perception representations in narratives. It is often the case that in narratives what a character sees is described from his/her perspective. Consider an example from The Marriage of Figaro in (28) quoted in Doron (1991). (28) describes a scene where Figaro sees Countess Almaviva in his wife’s clothes approaching Count Almaviva in the dark. (28) is a description of what Figaro sees, justifying the mistaken description his wife. Note that the indexical now occurs with the past tense in (28), denoting the time of the perception. (28) Figaro froze in place. He couldn’t believe his eyes. His wife had swooned into the Count’s arms and was now kissing him passionately. In (28), Figaro’s perception, rather than his speech or thought, is described. In other words, character’s perception reports do not constitute Free Indirect Discourse in its strict sense.8 In my view, it encodes a character perspective,

7 Kuno puts forward several constraints on “Empathy Hierarchy” one of which is the Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy stating that the speaker cannot empathize with someone else more than himself. Therefore, if the speaker participates in the described situation, the point of view is invariably his/her own. If the speaker describes a situation involving a third person, on the other hand, the speaker typically takes the point of view of the subject/topic, making it the locus of empathy. 8 ‘Represented thought’ here refers only to Free Indirect Discourse where the speaker/narrator completely identifies with the internal protagonist. I assume that in standard Indirect Discourse in English, there is no such identification, and the perspective remains with the actual speaker in the main clause. As a result, indexical expressions in the embedded report clause are anchored to the utterance context, not to the reported speech act context. I will discuss this topic in detail in Chapter 8.

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resulting in an update of the agent coordinate in the perspective, but not in the introduction of an FID context. I clearly distinguish between (physical) perspective and thought/speech reports. I have used the term ‘perspective’ for the physical point of view, which is a broader concept including thought/speech representation marked by Free Indirect Discourse. 3.2 PDRSs for Narrative Discourse Let me present some concrete examples of how to build a PDRS. Consider a narrative passage in (29), taken from A Man Called Ove. (29) a. He stopped by the traffic sign (informing motorists that they were prohibited from entering the residential area.) b. He gave the metal pole a firm kick. We begin constructing the PDRS for (29) by creating the context PDRS K0. The set of discourse referents in K0 (UK0) contains the most prominent point of view variable (pov), which yields the discourse referent for the current agent when an agent predicate is applied, i.e., agent(pov) = x, the discourse referent for the most prominent temporal interval on the narrative timeline when a time predicate is applied, i.e., time(pov) = t, and the discourse referent for the current narrative location when a loc(ation) predicate is applied, i.e., loc(pov) = l. Following the more recent and increasingly more common bottom-up construction process (e.g., van der Sandt, 1992), I assume that the PDRS construction proceeds incrementally as a two-step process of first creating a preliminary discourse representation including presuppositions and then verifying the presuppositions in the context to produce the final PDRS.9 As shown in (30), a preliminary PDRS is a pair of a presupposition PDRS, which is the dotted box on the left, and an assertion PDRS, which is the solid box on the right, separated by a comma in a bracket. In the beginning of a discourse, they are empty.

9 van der Sandt (1992) points out some difficulties of satisfaction theory of presupposition (Heim, 1983; Kartunnen, 1974; Stalnaker, 1973, 1974), which motivates him to treat presupposition and anaphora resolution on a par using DRSs with A (naphoric)-structure (preliminary PDRS s in PDRT). They are like proto-DRS s that are still under construction, but they are not elements of the proper DRT language and thus do not require interpretation.

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(30)

Proceeding with the linguistic material from (29), the passage is the narrator’s objective description of the events, so agent(pov) is set to the narrator. The first sentence in (29a) describes an event of the main character, Ove, stopping by the traffic signal. An event discourse referent e for this event is entered into K1 and included in its location time t′ in (31). (31)

Events are temporally included in their location time since they are temporally bound, whereas states include their location time because they lack temporal boundary. The third person pronoun he triggers the presupposition such that there is a salient male in the given context, and the past tense -ed presupposes that there is a salient time on the narrative timeline when the described event occurs.10 The pronoun introduces its own discourse referent z that needs to find its antecedent to fix its referent, which is indicated by the condition z = ? in the presuppositional PDRS. The discourse referent y for Ove, which will provide the value for z when the context and the content PDRS s are merged, is introduced in K0 because it is a proper name, which is assumed to be already present in the story context (Common Ground).11 When the context and the content PDRS s are combined, the location time variable t′ will be equated with the time(pov), as well. 10

11

The definite NP the traffic sign also triggers a presupposition such that there is a unique traffic sign in the discourse context. I will not discuss the processing of the definite NP here but defer it to Chapter 10. The familiarity presupposition of the proper name such that there is a representation of

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(32) shows the resulting PDRS after the presuppositions have been resolved by equating z with y, and t′ with t, which are accessible from the context PDRS K0. The accessibility conditions will be provided in the next section. I will simplify and omit the condition t′ = t in the resulting PDRS because (29a) is a discourse-initial sentence and thus there is no temporal update. (32)

As we have discussed, a new sentence can attach either to the immediately preceding sentence or to an explicit or implicit superordinate topic sentence, following the right frontier constraint of pronoun resolutions (Asher and Lascarides, 2003). The next sentence in (29b) describes an event of Ove kicking the metal pole. A new PDRS K2 is created to represent this information, introducing a new event discourse referent e′ that is included in a new location time t′. The new sentence triggers the presupposition that it is temporally and coherently related to a preceding sentence. In this case, there is only one prior sentence, which is represented in K1, so the new PDRS K2 will be connected to it. A variable ρ for a temporal relation, and a variable C for a coherence relation in the presuppositional PDRS in (33) will be supplied their values from the prior context to determine specific relations.

its bearer is a type of presupposition that is easily accommodated: if the bearer is not yet represented in the context, then it is readily updated by adding a representation for the name’s bearer (Kamp et al., 2011). There will be more discussions on proper names in Chapter 10.

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(33)

I present the merged PDRS in (34) in a slightly different format, assigning each clause its own PDRS to make these temporal and discourse relations between clauses visually and intuitively clear. (34) PDRS for (29a) and (29b)

It is inferred that Ove kicked the metal pole after he stopped by the traffic sign, because (29a) and (29b) are telic event descriptions. Also, the coherent relation Narration holds between the two PDRS s. K3 is introduced to the right of K2, visually encoding the rhetorically parallel as well as temporally sequential structure between the two. The coherence relation holds between the two PDRSs in the main content PDRS that is attributed to the narrator. As I will describe in the following chapters, subordinating coherence relations (e.g., Explanation, Elaboration, Contrast) will call for vertical PDRS s, indicating also that they do not move the narrative time forward. These visual representations, however, are simply meant to better reflect the mental representation

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of the interpreter and thus for conveniences only, having no model-theoretic effects. In this sense, my new PDRS can be thought of as a hybrid representation that provides not only the truth conditions, as in formal semantics, but also the mental representations of the language user, as in cognitive linguistics. In (34) above, the time(pov) is updated to a later time, which is indicated with a strikethrough on the existing condition time(pov) = t. In line with Stojnic et al. (2017), I assume that the model contains a stack of povs where the topmost pov is the most prominent one at the current point in discourse. I argue that the pov update is always carried out in the topmost PDRS K0 because the management of the prominence stack is part of the context. For example, if there is a shift in agent(pov) to a different character or to the narrator, the existing agent(pov) will be popped out from the top of the stack (indicated with strikethrough on the existing pov condition in K0) and a new agent(pov) will be pushed onto it. The same applies to other coordinates of the pov; time(pov) is updated whenever a new telic event sentence is introduced, and loc(pov) is updated whenever there is a scene change. I assume that only the topmost entities in the pov stack are visible, that is, the old pov conditions that are crossed-out no longer affect the interpretation (of indexical expressions). The pov update rules will be provided in the next section. The new PDRT analysis is capable of representing the episode structure. Consider (35), in which the episode boundary between the episodes 1 and 2 of The Dead is drawn. Table 1 above contains more detailed information about these episodes. (35a) is the last sentence in the first episode, which is about the arrival of the main character Gabriel and his wife Gretta as well as his interaction with the housemaid Lily. (35a) can be attached to the previous clauses in the first episode as a continuation of the same theme. (35b), however, introduces a new episode and must be attached to the highest superordinate clause, since it no longer narrates the episode 1 material. (35) a. The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:— Well, thank you, sir. b. He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. (36) is the PDRS for (35). I used a dashed number subscript for PDRS s under the same episode for convenience.

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(36) K0

The second episode introduces new characters, a new location, a new time, and a new event. Perception descriptions trigger an update in agent(pov) because the point of view or perspective, as I have argued, refers to the physical spatiotemporal location and is not restricted to represented thought and speech in Free Indirect Discourse. In such cases, the narrator describes a scene from a character’s viewpoint. (35a) adopts Lily’s perspective because of the perception verb see, which identifies the agent(pov) with Lily. (35b), on the other hand, reflects Gabriel’s perspective due to the perception verb listen. Hence, agent(pov) is updated accordingly in the topmost PDRS K0. (35b) introduces new events of Gabriel going upstairs and waiting outside of the drawing room, which are later than the time of Lily calling out to Gabriel. Therefore, the time(pov) is also updated to reflect the narrative progression. It also changes the scene from the downstairs main entrance to outside of the drawing room upstairs, resulting in a loc(pov) update. Episode 2 also introduces new characters including the guests at the party. Since there is a significant change between (35a) and (35b) in terms of character, event, location, and time, an episode boundary is drawn and a new PDRS K4 containing new linguistic content is created.

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3.3 Syntax and Semantics of PDRT In this section, I will provide formal definitions of the syntax and semantics of PDRS-languages. The basic syntax that can generate PDRS s for the discourse we have examined so far is laid out in (37). The definition of a PDRS consisting of UK and ConK are given in (37a). (37b) generates conditions such as ‘traffic sign(y)’, meaning y is a traffic sign, and ‘kick(x, y)’, meaning x kicks y. (37c) is the identity condition between two discourse referents, yielding conditions like x = y for an anaphoric resolution and t = t′ for a simultaneous temporal relation. (37d) pertains to temporal relations between two intervals of time. (37e) presents PDRS conditions for pov. (37f) contains rules for complex PDRSs in which a sub-PDRS occurs as part of complex PDRS s, involving logical connectives (negation ¬, conditional ⇒, and disjunction ∨). Note that there is no definition for the conjunction ∧. Conjoined sentences are treated in terms of the merge operation ⊕ between two PDRS s K and K′, defined as their pointwise union: K⊕K′ = ⟨ UK ∪ UK′, ConK ∪ ConK′ ⟩. (37g) is the rule for constructing complex PDRSs containing coherence relations between two PDRSs. (37) PDRT Syntax: a. A PDRS K is a pair ⟨UK, ConK⟩ where UK is a set of discourse referents and ConK is a set of PDRS- conditions. b. If P is an n-place predicate and x1, …, xn are discourse referents, then P (x1, …, xn) is a PDRS- condition. c. If x and y are discourse referents, then x = y is a PDRS-condition. d. If t and t′ are discourse referents for times, then t < t′, t O t′, and t ⊆ t′ are PDRS-conditions. e. If x, t, l and pov are discourse referents, then agent(pov) = x, time(pov) = t, and loc(pov) = l are PDRS-conditions. f. If K and K′ are PDRSs, then ¬K, K ⇒ K′, and K ∨ K′ are PDRS-conditions. g. If K and K′ are PDRSs and C is a coherence relation, then K.C (K, K′).K′ is a PDRS-condition. (38) provides the accessibility conditions. A pronoun must be equated with a full noun in a PDRS that is accessible to it. In general, a discourse referent from a superordinate PDRS is accessible to a pronoun in subordinate PDRS. (38d) ensures that a discourse referent for a full noun in prior PDRS s in a connected discourse is accessible to a discourse referent for a pronoun in subsequent PDRSs.

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(38) Accessibility Accessibility is a relation between PDRSs that is reflexive and transitive. For all PDRSs K, K′, and K′′, if ConK contains a condition of the form a. ¬K′ then K is accessible to K′ b. K′ ⇒ K′′ then K is accessible to K′ and K′ is accessible to K′′ c. K′ ∨ K′′ then K is accessible to K′ and K′′ d. K′ (C (K, K′))K′′ then K is accessible to K′ and K′′ and K′ is accessible to K′′ The PDRSs constructed following the recursive definitions in (37) are semantically interpreted in a model as follows. A model is a sextuple of the form ⟨W, T,