Possessives in Naturally Occurring Discourse: A Centering Approach
Sookhee Chae · Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2003
IntroductionCentering is a model of the conversants ' center of attention in a discourse that is concerned with the relationship of attentional state, inferential complexity, and the form of referring expressions (Walker, Joshi and Prince 1998).The basic claims of this theory are that certain entities mentioned in an utterance are more central than others and that this property imposes constraints on a speaker's use of different types of referring expressions.Following this framework, the more central an entity is, the more liable it is to be represented by a pronominal.Possessives as a type of pronominal have peculiar characteristics.An NP that contains a possessive adjective in fact refers to two different entities, the Possessor (P or) and the Possessed (P ed) .How to deal with possessives is one of the open issues in centering.The problem is to explain how these two entities function in a discourse, both as a link to the previous discourse and as a prediction of the subsequent discourse.This paper is based on a corpus study, since we need to see how speakers actually use these expressions in naturally occurring discourse to settle this issue.This paper will examine how these two entities function in naturally occurring discourse.As centering is intended as a model of local discourse coherence, the goal of this paper is to show how the two entities referred to by possessives affect that coherence in naturally occurring discourse. Centering ModelCentering is proposed as a model of the local-level component of attentional state (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein 1995). 1 They propose that there are inter-• This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2000-037-ABOOI3).This is an expanded version of a presentation given in Ellen Prince's Spring 2001 Pragmatics class.I would like to thank Dr. Prince and other colleagues, especially John Bell, for helpful comments on earlier versions.All errors are mine. 1 Centering fits within the theory of discourse structure developed by Grosz and Sidner ( 1986).It distinguishes three components of discourse structure: a linguistic