Common Topics and Coherent Situations: Interpreting Ellipsis in the Context of Discourse Inference

Abstract

It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the syntax, and (2) whether the form is anaphoric in the semantics. It is proposed that these features interact with one of two types of discourse inference, namely {\it Common Topic} inference and {\it Coherent Situation} inference. The differing ways in which these types of inference utilize syntactic and semantic representations predicts phenomena for which it is otherwise difficult to account.