Coreference and Representationalism

The compositional interpretation of structures in discourse has raised the question whether some level of representation is indispensable in the analysis of the semantics of natural language. In this paper we formulate and motivate three notions of representationalism (a strong, a medium or midweak, and a weak one) and discuss to what extent existing formal semantic frameworks qualify as (strongly, midweakly or weakly) represen-tational. Research into the semantics of anaphorical relationships in the eighties has led to a debate about the question whether some level of representation is indispensable in the analysis of the semantics of natural language. Within the logically oriented or model-theoretic tradition of natural language semantics, Hans Kamp is a prominent proponent of the thesis that it is; Jeroen Groe-nendijk and Martin Stokhof have explicitly argued against it. Interestingly, the two nowadays agree on this issue: that some level of representation is indispensable in modeling the interpretation of natural language. But what about the semantics of natural language?