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In this paper we examine the pragmatic knowledge an utterance-planning system must have in order to produce certain kinds of definite and indefinite noun phrases. An utterance.planning system, like other planning systems, plans actions to satisfy an agent's goals, but allows some of the actions to consist of the utterance of sentences. This approach to language generation emphasizes the view of language as action, and hence assigns a critical role to pragmatics. The noun phrases under consideration in this paper are those that presuppose the existence of an individual that could be described by the description D. In other. | Some Pragmatic Issues in the Planning of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases Douglas E. Appelt Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International and Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University 1 Introduction In this paper we examine the pragmatic knowledge an utterance-planning system must have in order to produce certain kinds of definite and indefinite noun phrases. An utterance-planning system like other planning systems plans actions to satisfy an agent s goals but allows some of the actions to consist of the utterance of sentences. This approach to language generation emphasizes the view of language as action and hence assigns a critical role to pragmatics. The noun phrases under consideration in this paper are those that presuppose the existence of an individual that could be described by the description D. In other words when a speaker uses a noun phrase with description D it makes sense to ask the question Which X is p This cri- terion includes more than strictly referential uses of noun phrases because it is not necessary for the speaker or hearer to know what individual is described by D it is merely necessary that the existence of such an individual is presupposed. Consider the attributive description in sentence 1 J The runner who wins tomorrow s race will qualify for the semifinals. The description runner who wins tomorrow s race cannot be referential because under ordinary circumstances the speaker could not possibly know who it is that would fit the description. Nevertheless it is still reasonable to ask which runner will win tomorrow s race because the description is objectively true of some individual. This qualification excludes noun phrases whose referents are bound within the scope of a universal quantifier such as the woman . in 2 Every man wants to meet the woman of his dreams. For a similar reason indefinites within the scope of a sentential negation are excluded because they introduce an existential quantifier which
