LINGUIST List 12.520

Sat Feb 24 2001

Qs: Discourse Referents/Time, "Gengo Seikatsu"

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Robert Belvin, discourse referents and time
2. Vladimir Rykov, Gengo Seikatsu

Does anyone know of studies which look at the extent to which the passage 
of time determines whether a discourse referent is "current" or not. For 
example, given a discourse like the following:

A: "Is John here?"
B: "I don't know"
 ...time delay...
C: "Is he in his office?"

How long a time delay might there be before "he" in the third sentence 
could no longer felicitously be interpreted as "John", assuming no other 
discourse referents had been introduced during the delay. I realize this 
example is simplistic, but hopefully it suffices to illustrate the area of 
study I'm interested in.

Thanks,
Robert Belvin


- ---------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Belvin Loc MA Bldg 254 M/S RL96
HRL Laboratories
3011 Malibu Canyon Rd, Malibu, CA 90265, USA
Tel : (310) 317 5799 (office) (310) 317 5640 (Secretary)
Fax : (310) 317 5695 email : robinhrl.com
=================================================================

	
I would be grateful if anyone would send me info/sources of info (in
English) of a kind of Japanese linguistic field of research called
"Gengo Seikatsu" (somemthing like "linguistic Existence" in my double
bad translation)
		
	
Vladimir Rykov, PhD in Computational Linguistics, 
Personal web-site: http://rykov.narod.ru/
MOCKBA, Linguistic Institute of RAS 
English version: http://www.blkbox.com/~gigawatt/rykov.html