REFCHECK {MoLE}

Check referential capacity

Description

Check if pronoun is sufficiently strong to establish reference to referent. If not, another word is recruited for support, the pronoun being suffixed to the verb.

Usage

REFCHECK(speakerID, proposition, situation)

Arguments

speakerID

Pointer to speaker agent

proposition

Proposition in which the referential expressions are checked

situation

Situation in which referential relations have to be established

Details

Strength is determined by formal mass, i.e. simple word length. Non-local arguments are matched with real-world argument; local pronoun with role, after which marker is removed. If there's no local pronominal paradigm yet, select prominent noun for local ref

Value

a proposition, i.e. a list:

external

representation of the external argument, checked for strength

internal

representation of the internal argument, if identified, checked for strength

verb

representation of the action argument, possibly including person indexing if original expression for (one of the) event participants fell short

target

target event to be described

Author(s)

Sander Lestrade

References

Zeevat, Henk. 2007. "Simulating recruitment in evolution". Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation ed. by G. Bouma, I. Kraemer & J. Zwarts, 175-194. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ariel, M. (1999). The development of person agreement markers: From pronouns to higher accessibility markers. In M. Barlow & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Usage based models of language (p. 197-260). Stanford: CSLI.

See Also

PREPARE

Examples

FOUND()
situation=SITUATION(1)
(proposition=PROPOSITION(1, situation))
REFCHECK(1, proposition, situation)	
#only effective if words have grammaticalized already