Bridging Reference to Eventualities

Abstract

Bridging anaphora can refer not only to previously introduced discourse entities, but also to abstract entities such as eventualities. The proposal made in this paper is to extend the current account of bridging in SDRT in a way that implicit reference to eventualities can be accounted for. We exploit the idea developed in Frame Semantics that world knowledge is organized in frames. With each eventuality introduced in a discourse, a corresponding frame is evoked in the discourse model. SDRT will be extended to include possibly underspecified representations of frame elements, which can give clues for finding suitable antecedents in bridging anaphora.