Recoverability Optimality Theory: Discourse Anaphora in a Bidirectional framework

In this work we explore the possibility of formalizing explanations based in the notion “deletion under recoverability”: information should be omitted in expressions if that information can be recovered without being overtly expressed – e.g., from information already encoded in the state of the discourse. This style of explanation is difficult to formalize for many reasons, among them that the contradictory factors involved are not resolved in a simple, consistent way. Optimality Theory permits the conflicts to be formally adjudicated, and allows the conflicts to be resolved in different ways in different languages. We will present what to our knowledge is the first formal theory of the cross-linguistics typology of discourse anaphora systems.