Processing noun phrases in natural discourse

Abstract: This thesis is about the use and interpretation of referential expressions in discourse. Referential expressions are, simply put, those words and phrases in language that can be used for referring to persons, objects, phenomena, times, places and other 'things'. The most important category of referring expressions is the noun phrase, which is also the main concern of the thesis. The focus is on norm phrases in the context of the discourse and hence on the global aspects of norm phrase use and interpretation. Most of the discussions in the thesis are based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of actual noun phrase occurrences in natural language corpora. The word 'processing' in the title is chosen with intention of capturing both what the human interpreter does and what can be done by a computer. The thesis is based on a collection of seven papers which fall into three parts: The first two papers concern pronominal reference and present corpus studies of personal pronouns in natural discourse with a main focus on singular and plural pronouns, respectively. Four papers focus on the interpretation of full, or lexical, noun phrases, in particular definite ones. The last paper is about an area referred to as 'situation reference', which among other things encompasses so-called 'propositional' it.