A Game-Theoretical Approach to Anaphora

Abstract

Let us return to our main question. How, then, do anaphoric pronouns operate? How can they operate, if the grammatical relation of a pronoun to its antecedent is not relied on? An interesting alternative is suggested by our treatment of anaphoric the-phrases expounded in the second part of this book (cf., Hintikka and Kulas 1982, 1983, forthcoming; Kulas 1982). Instead of relying on the grammatical relation between an anaphoric the-phrase and its antecedent, that treatment relies on a contextually given set of entities, called /. Its members are not grammatical objects, but entities of the kind one’s language speaks of. This set is not determined by the definite-article phrase alone, nor is it determined in conjunction with the sentence S in question. It is not constant for all the the-phrases occurring in one and the same S. It consists essentially of those individuals (of the appropriate category) that have been picked out in the semantical game G(S) associated with S (or otherwise available to the players) at the time a rule is applied to the the-phrase in question in the game.