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<Paper uid="C96-1060">
  <Title>The discourse functions of Italian subjects: a centering approach</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> hiterpreting referential expressions is importatlt for any large coverage NL system; while such systems do exist for Italian, e.g. (Stock et al., 1993; Lombardo and Lesmo, 1994), to my knowledge not mudi attention has been devoted to the interpretation of Italian referential expressions. Some exceptions are (Samek-Lodovici and Strapparava, 1990), that discusses interpretation of referential expressions within dialogues to access a videodisc on Italimi art; (Not and Zancanaro, 1995), that adopts a systemic gra,nmar approadi (Halliday, 1976); and (Di Eugenio, 1990), which uses centering theory (Grosz et al., 1995) to account for the alternation of null and strong subjects.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> hi this paper, I build on and expand (Di Eugenio, 1990) in several ways. First, I reanalyzc the hypotheses I proposed earlier with respect to a corl)uS of naturally occurring data} I show that those hypotheses are basically supported, iThe examples in (Di Euge.nio, 199{)) were constructed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> and that when they aren't an elegant explmiation can be found by looking at a two member sequence of ce,ttering tra,tsitions rather than at just ()tie transition. Second, I extend my previous analysis by also discussing the centering functions of full NPs in subject position, and some occurrences of pronotuis tuiaccounted for by centering.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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