11.2.5 Accessibility

Accessibility, informally defined.

Now, accessibility is informally defined as follows. Discourse referents of DRS are accessible from DRS only if one of the following two conditions hold:

1. subordinates ;

2. and denote the same DRS.

Accessibility is by no means the only criterion for an antecedent to be classified as `suitable' for an anaphoric pronoun. Many factors play a role in pronoun resolution, ranging from prosodic and syntactic information to topic-focus articulation and common-sense knowledge - discourse structure is just one of the factors that constrain resolution. Nevertheless, accessibility is a useful constraint, so let's look at some more examples supporting DRT.