Intra-sentential extra-word processing

There is more information contained within a sentence, however, than simply the words themselves. Relationships between the words may exist at a level beyond the syntactic level. For example, one important form of disambiguation which must occur is that of pronominal reference. In the third sentence of the synopsis, the reader is told that Although he appears as an adult humanoid.... It is necessary to determine what character the he is referring to, a fact made straightforward in this example as there is only one possibility. To accomplish this task, sentence processing accesses the story structure representation which is being built by the reader; part of the information contained in this representation is the set of characters which exist in the story. By examining the story characters and by using information which is known about various pronouns, it is often possible to correctly reference the pronoun to the proper antecedent. In the Squire example, there are two characters which the he could refer to--either Kirk or Trelane. Both are singular in form and masculine in gender. In this situation, the most recent character is preferred. An   anticipation is generated that there will be further evidence to support this; this is provided by the remainder of the sentence, as there is a forward reference for the pronoun as well as a backward one.

It is unreasonable to allow any character in the story to match to a current pronoun; in longer stories, this will quickly become too inaccurate of a heuristic. As a result, the task actually considers only the characters in the story which are within the current scope of the pronoun. A scope is determined by certain structural elements of the story. For example, in a novel, one does not wish to make pronoun references across chapter boundaries; therefore, a new set of characters is maintained for each chapter in order to do the reference. In the short stories I am dealing with, chapters do not exist; instead, I utilize a smaller scope--the paragraph. It might be the case that the pronoun is a pure forward referencing one. So, if no characters exist which can be referenced to the pronoun, the supertask will generate an   anticipation that one should be seen in the upcoming text.

The non-word portions of the sentence also carry information concerning the proper interpretation of the text. For instance, the punctuation contained in the sentence is a source of a great deal of information; as a result, another task of the sentence processing supertask is that of punctuation analysis. Consider Lycanthrope again--the first sentence of the story ends with an exclamation point and is bounded by a set of double quotations. Both of these punctuation markers carry important information to the reader. Later, story structure comprehension will be able to make use of the fact that quotation marks exist to anticipate that a conversation is occurring between characters. When the punctuation analysis task recognizes the quotation marks, an   anticipation will be generated that a speaker and a recipient should be discovered in the text. The story structure comprehension supertask uses this information when characters are discovered. If the characters it discovers can act as the speaker and the recipient, then the   anticipation is fulfilled. Similarly, the exclamation point will be used by the scenario comprehension supertask to indicate a level of excitement should be attached to the speaker of this first sentence. Again, an anticipation is generated which is used by the other supertask; specifically, the task of agent modeling will use the anticipation to modify its view of the agent which is discovered to be the speaker of the utterance.