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<Paper uid="E85-1031">
  <Title>INTERPRETING SINGULAR DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS IN DATABASE QUERIES</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="215" end_page="216" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
($3) Yes
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> implies the statement &amp;quot;Jones took a sample from the firm Miller&amp;quot; and that hance the description of the discourse referent would contain the proposition EVOKE (x, S~).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  A system which behaves like a natural discourse partner should store the description of the discourse referent (together with a pointer to its referential index which was retrieved on answering $2). If the user should in the subsequent discourse - no matter how many sentences intervene - refer to &amp;quot;the sample Jones took from Miller&amp;quot; the system should not reject this description as being incompletely specified. If the answer to ($2) had been negative, no discourse referent would have been established. Can one infer from this example the general rule that negatively answered questions cannot establish a discourse referent ? Consider the following interaction : (S4) Did the graduate admissions committee hold a meeting today? (s~) ~o.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> ($6) Was the meeting postponed ? Can the expression &amp;quot;the meeting&amp;quot; in ($6) be construed as an abbreviation for &amp;quot;the meeting of the graduate admissions committee which was not held yesterday&amp;quot; or is it simply an abbreviation for &amp;quot;the meeting of the graduate admissions committee&amp;quot; ? The difference between ($2) and ($4) can perhaps be accounted for by the difference between the non-s~ecific use of the indefinite article in ($2) and the specific use in ($4).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In the specific use the relative clause derived from the predicate in the original question, ie that was held yesterday, should be understood in a non-restrictive sense and is hence not an essential part in the description of the discourse referent. Further research into the behaviour of indefinites in negative and interrogative contexts is is again called for.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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