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<Paper uid="E93-1014">
  <Title>On the notion of uniqueness *</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="110" end_page="111" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Uniqueness and NLP
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Let us return to the problem outlined in the introduction. If we disregard quantificational elements such as quantifiers, negation etc., a DRT-representation is just a large set of (unordered) conditions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * These conditions constrain the assignments of sets to discourse markers, and the order in which this happens is without significance (as long as, roughly, antecedents are introduced before anaphors). I have shown in this paper that this is an unwanted result.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> There are phenomena in language that more or less indicate that the assignment to a discourse marker under discussion is fixed at a certain point. This means that the constraining conditions are not just interchangeable.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4">  The University fired 5 friends of mine, who were researchers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The University fired 5 researchers, who were friends of mine.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> I know exactly two Spanish people.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> They live in my street.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> I know exactly two people in my street.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> They're Spanish.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> Both the non-restrictive clause and the precision adverb indicate the properties that exhaust the set we are talking about. A set consisting of all and only the Spanish people I know (who happen to live in my street) is not (necessarily) the same as the set of all people who live in my street (and who, by the way, all happen to be Spanish). The asymmetry of these predications over sets should be represented in the semantic representation, in order to account for the difference in truth conditions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11">  The interpretation of the arrow is given in section 4.2.2. From that definition it follows that the arrow is not symmetric. The conditions on the antecedent and the anaphor are therefore not interchangeable. This in turn means that we have reintroduced the notion of 'constituent' in our semantic representation.  The constituent is not motivated by the full stop, or any other syntactic or orthographic devices, but for semantic reasons.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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