A DRT Analysis of Discourse Referents and Anaphora Resolution in Sign Language

Abstract

Sign languages use the horizontal plane of the signing space to introduce discourse referents at particular referential loci (R-loci). R-loci could be viewed as abstract referential indices also known from spoken language grammar. However, in sign languages the spatial relations between R-loci appear to be exploited in establishing anaphoric relations between discourse referents, thus reducing ambiguities. In this article, we propose a feature-driven space geometry that captures a variety of ways in which anaphoric relationships can be established, and we conservatively extend classical Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) to incorporate geometric peculiarities of R-loci that can be used as constraints on anaphora resolution, meanwhile holding on to the intuition that R-loci, just like referential indices, have no semantic interpretation of their own. Our theory ameliorates the listing problem and captures part–whole behavior of anaphora in sign languages.

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