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<Paper uid="T87-1033">
  <Title>Position Paper: Event Reference</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="158" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Developing a computational account of event reference requires solution to a number of difficult problems, not least of which is characterizing the phenomenon itself. From a listener's point of view, eveni reference encompasses both the task of building up a structured model of the events and situations underlying a given text and the task of interpreting subsequent references to these events and situations afterwards. A computational approach to these tasks requires at least (1) a characterization of the information that an individual clause may convey about an event or situation; (2) a characterization of explicit clues a text gives as to how the pieces described in individual clauses fit together (assuming, as I do, that this does not rely solely on world knowledge; (3) an account of what the listener does in processing an explicit event reference; (4) a characterization of what events and situations are available for explicit reference; and (5) a procedure for choosing among possible ways of resolving an explicit event reference.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> What I have to say in this paper concerns only the third problem. (In \[8\], I discuss both the second and third problems in detail.) My position on event reference centers on something I'm calling event/situation structure or e/s structure. Along with building up a discourse model of the entities salient to the.given text, the listener is also building up a model of the events and situations they participate in -- e/s structure. (I actually see e/s structure as representing a bit more than just the events and situations underlying the text: that is, I see it as representing the speaker's view of those events and situations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Hence e/s structure may also contain substructure corresponding to finer-grained descriptions of other events and situations in the structure, as well as substructure corresponding to the speaker's vantage point in describing an event or situation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> This paper is limited to a discussion of e/s structure and its role in explicit pronominal reference to events. My view of pronominal reference is that it involves reference to entities in a discourse model \[7\]. While e/s structure in the current view is separate from the listener's discourse model, there are important connections between them. Of particular importance is that certain entities in the discourse model may directly represent nodes or substructure in e/s structure. Essentially, a discourse entity is no more than a common locus of reference and information attachment. Semantically, it may correspond to any type of individual -- an object, a set of objects, a generic class, etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> If and only if something is associated with a particular discourse entity, I will say that it is viewed as an individual. So, for example, if there are separate discourse entities corresponding to John and to Mary, but no discourse entity corresponding to the set comprising the two of them, I will say that that set is not (yet) viewed as an individual. Conversely, if a discourse entity corresponds to some set (say, one evoked by the phrase &amp;quot;three kangaroos&amp;quot;) that set is viewed as an individual but the members may not be. The notion of being an individual -deg that is, as having a separate, unique locus of reference and information attachment -- will become important shortly.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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