Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse
Computational Linguistics
Focusing in the comprehension of definite anaphora
Readings in natural language processing
A centering approach to pronouns
ACL '87 Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse
ACL '83 Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Prosody and the resolution of pronominal anaphora
COLING '00 Proceedings of the 18th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 2
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By strictest interpretation, theories of both centering and intonational meaning fail to predict the existence of pitch accented pronominals. Yet they occur felicitously in spoken discourse. To explain this, I emphasize the dual functions served by pitch accents, as markers of both propositional (semantic/pragmatic) and attentional salience. This distinction underlies my proposals about the attentional consequences of pitch accents when applied to pronominals, in particular, that while most pitch accents may weaken or reinforce a cospecifier's status as the center of attention, a contrastively stressed pronominal may force a shift, even when contraindicated by textual features.