Bridges between events
Frame semantics and indirect anaphora
Bridging consists of an indirect anaphoric relationship, which is not expressed by linguistic means, between an entity introduced in a discourse and some previously mentioned discourse entity. Indirect anaphora can refer back not only to objects that are talked about in the discourse, but also to abstract entities such as eventualities. In order to establish these connections, this contribution exploits the idea of Frame Semantics that world knowledge is organized in frames, in which all relevant participants to an event are stored. With each eventuality introduced in a discourse, a corresponding frame is evoked in the discourse model. SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory) is extended to include possibly underspecified representations of frame elements, thus supporting and constraining the resolution of indirect anaphora involving eventualities.