Towards a Formal Model of the Deictically Constructed Context of Narratives

摘要

This paper proposes an approach to representing the context created by the use of deictic expressions in narrative discourse. It is based on the integration of approaches to formalizing context as first-class objects, the situation calculus for representing actions, text world theory for providing a cognitive model of discourse functioning and the classical linguistic understanding of the functioning of referential indices in language. The result is a representation of the context created by the indexical expressions in the narrative. This is the context needed to interpret each utterance as well as the whole discourse.