Discourse Salience and Pronoun Resolution in Hindi
Rashrni Prasad, Michael Strube · Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2000
This paper investigates anaphoric reference in Hindi, with particular focus on the use and interpretation of third person personal pronouns to realize anaphoric relationships between noun phrases. We have two specific goals. The first is inspired by the central idea of Centering theory (Grosz et al. 1995), namely, that each utterance in a discourse evokes certain discourse entities (Webber 1978; Prince 1981) which comprise the list of forward-looking centers (the Cf -list), in Centering terms, and which are ranked according to their salience. The anaphoric relationships in the local discourse segment (Grosz and Sidner 1986) are dependent on the Cf -list ranking, in that the more highly ranked entities in an utterance are more likely to be talked about in the following utterance. Investigation of the factors that determine the Cf -list ranking -- which have not yet been completely specified -- has, therefore, constituted an important aspect of the research for Centering theory in particular, and for discourse anaphora in general. Furthermore, crosslinguistic research has revealed that this ranking is dependent on language specific factors (Walker et al. 1994; Turan 1995; Strube and Hahn 1999, among others). Our purpose here is to investigate such factors in Hindi, with special focus on the role of grammatical function, word order, and information status. We also propose a novel, general method for determining these ranking factors.