Co-Interpretation Network in English Discourse

There has been little effort made to substantiate Halliday and Hasan's co-reference framework since their work was published 20-odd years ago, excepted for a slight modification in Martin (1992). Fligelstone (1992), Garside (1993), Garside et al. (1997) and Botley & McEnery (eds. forthcoming) have proposed an annotation scheme for tagging texts canpuationally. However, their theoretical foundation is Halliday & Hasan (1976), which is sketchy and confined to major co-reference relations. In this paper, I will examine thoroughly how English noun phrases are interpreted in discourse. I recognise two roles that a noun phrase plays in discourse. One is that of the introductory expression which may fimction as the antecedent of a co-referential / co-interpretational network. The other is that of the dependent coreferring / co-interpretational expression, which depends on the introductory expression for the interpretation of its co-referent or descriptive content. I will describe the major types of relation between two co-referring / cointerpretational expressions in a discourse in order to prepare for a comprehensive discoursal networking system of English noun phrases.