Fragmenting Meaning: Clarification Ellipsis and Nominal Anaphora

Abstract

In this paper, I propose to relate and effect progress in performing two tasks: first, I show how the process of utterance clarification licenses a form of ellipsis which requires meanings to be stored in the context in a highly structured fashion and to encode presuppositions concerning the structure of previously occurring utterances. With this as some motivation for a particular form of representation of the updates effected by utterances, I will turn to nominal anaphora and suggest that this can offer a basis for a view of anaphora resolution which circumvents a number of significant puzzles which plague formal semantic approaches originally designed to process text/monologue.