Tense, temporal expressions and demonstrative licensing in natural discourse

Abstract

Demonstrative terms are highly context-dependent elements both in deictic and anaphoric uses. When reference is transferred from a visual, three-dimensional context to the textual domain, information-structure factors (i.e. the cognitive status of the antecedent, recency of mention, syntactic structure or the semantic type of the antecedent) have an effect on speaker preferences for selecting demonstrative anaphors over other referring expressions. In certain languages, there seems to be a correlation between demonstratives and tenses in discourse. For example, proximal demonstratives correlate better with present tenses whereas distal demonstratives correlate with past tenses. In this paper, we present a corpus study of Spanish texts that analyzes the ways in which temporal expressions selectively favor the use of specific demonstratives thus confirming the contextual dependency of demonstrative anaphors. © 2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.