And Rosta wrote:
>
> Wow. Amazing. Maybe this is the zeitgeist?
Possibly. Much pudding-making to go before there's anything to write home
about in my case, though.
> And this is why I've been so preoccupied with issues in the WG formalism
> of late. E.g. my questions about Clark Kent arose from struggling with
> how to represent anaphoric binding.
When I was working on pronominal reference many moons ago, I figured out
that I needed to not get distracted by tradition. (If it's a noun, you're
doing lexical semantics. If it's a pronoun, you shouldn't be doing
semantics at all. It's only a pronoun, silly, and pronouns don't have
meaning.).
I saw most of the problems go away when I took anaphoric, cataphoric and
deictic forms to mean exactly what they always mean: 'he' entails a
referent typically referred to as male that the speaker expects the hearer
to be able to identify somewhere in the discourse or situative context.
That's what 'he' means, and this meaning works in no way differently than
'the animal' or 'the thing'. It's only in the way the forms combine with
other forms that pronouns differ from nouns.
-- Mark
Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX
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