Introducing propositional discourse referents

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of which structures make propositions available for anaphoric reference, i.e., which structures introduce propositional discourse referents. I describe two current approaches to this question—one syntactic and one discursive—and then identify data which pose challenges to each approach. As an alternative, I offer a novel proposal: proposition-embedding operators introduce discourse referents for their propositional arguments. I show one way to formally model this generalization, using Update with Modal Centering (Bittner, 2011).