Ranking of Forward Looking Centers in Hindi.pdfVIP

Ranking of Forward Looking Centers in HindiRashmi PrasadDecember 30, 20001 Centering TheoryCentering Theory is a way of modeling attentional state in discourse. It is intended as a component of atheory of local discourse coherence.Each utterance Ui in a coherent local sequence of utterances (a discourse segment) U1 ... Um evokes a setof entities called the forward-looking centers, or Cf . This set is partially ordered and is ranked according tovarious formal (e.g., syntactic, morphological, theta role, prosodic) features, the rankings being determinedlanguage-specically. The highest ranked Cf in the Cf of some utterance Ui is called the Preferred Center,or Cp, of Ui. The Cp is a prediction about what the next utterance, Ui+1, will be about. Each utterance(other than the discourse initial utterance) has a backward-looking center, Cb. The highest ranked Cf inthe Cf of utterance Ui that appears (or is realized) in the Cf of the subsequent utterance Ui+1 is the Cbof Ui+1.2 RationaleThe ranking of the forward looking centers is the main determinant of the possible referring expressionsin subsequent discourse and therefore a determinant of local discourse coherence. The predictions of thetheory then crucially relies on the ranking of the items in the Cf .3 AssumptionsThe following assumptions are being made to determine the ranking of the Cf in Hindi: If there is a single pronoun in an utterance Un+1, then it must be the Cb. The Cb(Un+1) is the highest ranked entity of Cf (Un) which is realized in Un+1. If the highest ranked entity of Cf (Un+1) is not realized in Un+1, then the Cb is the next highest ranked1 entity of Cf (Un+1). (Of course, this follows only when we have determined what is the most salient entityof a Cf list).4 Background facts about HindiThe unmarked word order of Hindi is SOV. But many other constituent wird orders are possible givenappropriate discourse conditions. However, here I shall consider scrambling (including topicalization) ofonly the argu