Tense as Discourse Anaphor

In this paper, I consider a range of English expressions and show that their context-dependency can be characterized in terms of two properties: 1. they specify entities in an evolving model of the discourse that the listener is constructing; 2. the particular entity specified depends on another entity in that part of the evolving 'discourse model' that the listener is currently attending to. Such expressions have been called anaphors. I show how tensed clauses share these characteristics, usually just attributed to anaphoric noun phrases. This not only allows us to capture in a simple way the oft-stated but difficult-to-prove intuition that tense is anaphoric, but also contributes to our knowledge of what is needed for understanding narrative text. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-88-09. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/441 TENSE AS DISCOURSE ANAPHOR Bonnie Lynn Webber MS-CIS-88-09 LlNC LAB 98 Department of Computer and Information Science School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 191 04