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Accessibility and discourse structure.
The examples showed us how noun phrases introduce discourse referents and how pronouns co-refer to some of these noun phrases by referring to their discourse referents. Not all discourse referents are available for pronouns: the internal structure of discourse representations constrains the accessibility of discourse referents. The position of a discourse referent in the DRS determines whether it can be referred to by a pronoun, or put differently, whether it is accessible or not.
Accessibility itself is formally defined using the notion of subordination between DRSs. Informally, a DRS subordinates another DRS if the first encapsulates the second. A special case of subordination are implicational DRS-condition, where the antecedent DRS subordinates the consequent DRS. For a precise formalisation of subordination please see the definition.
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