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<Paper uid="E85-1003">
  <Title>DISTRIBUTIVES, QUANTIFIERS AND A MULTIPLICITY OF EVENTS</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="21" end_page="21" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6. CONCLUSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The anaphoric examples in section 4 show that both distributive and iterative clauses enable subsequent reference to sets of cases/events using a definite NP.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This is clearly parallel to the possibility of using a plural anaphoric NP to make reference to some set of individuals (such as books), on the basis of an original singular NP introduction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> It would seem to be desirable to account for both kinds in terms of the same mechanism of 'set construction'. The anaphoric examples also indicate a qualitative difference between the distribution of definite NP and pronominal anaphora, and show that there is discourse anaphoric access not just to the subparts of the distributed or iterated situation, but also to something like the whole distributive quantification, which may be an entity of a different kind.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The temporal binding phenomena of section 5 give a different type of evidence for the explanatory value of making a generalisation of the kind described. The observations in this section also show that, whereas past tense clauses describing a single situation have a reference time with some specific temporal referent, distributive and iterative clauses seem to require 'nested reference times', with temporal ordering relations definable at two levels. The Kamp/Hinrichs/Partee account needs to be modified before it is able to incorporate these phenomena.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> I've said that the set construction problem is of practical importance for computational models of natural language interaction. In addition, the concept of iterated action is important to planning, so that a generalisation across distributives and iteratives plus what has been said about their temporal nature should have interesting implications in this area. If iteration is handled computationally by setting up a loop which embodies the instruction to repeat an action under certain conditions, then distributives may be handled the same way. Distributive and iterative interpretations may hold over stretches of discourse, the delimitation of which is relevant to the interpretation of temporal connectives, and as we saw with examples (19) to (21), in some cases anaphoric phenomena may give clues about this delimitation, that ,is, indicating when to turn off the iterative loop. The delimitation of such discourse chunks corresponds to the delimitation of the extent of influence of the t or 'witness set', and so anaphor~ in following sentences may allow us to close off this interval.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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