Towards a computational semantics for demonstrative anaphors

Resumen

Demonstratives exhibit a dual nature with respect to their discourse behavior. On the one hand, they behave as directly referential elements commonly accompanied by a pointing gesture in their canonical use. On the other hand, speakers make use of demonstratives to refer to a range of entities that have been previously mentioned in discourse (discourse anaphora), such as events, propositions or any other type of abstract entities apparently lacking any kind of spatio-temporal anchoring. In this paper, we propose a characterization of Spanish demonstrative determiners and pronouns as generalized quantifiers, which will allow us to account for their heterogeneous referential nature and the principal differences among these elements.