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On the coreferential reading, she refers to Mary (repeated reference, cf.
FoCL'99, Sect. 6.3); this may be shown graphically as follows:
11.3.3 C OREFERENTIAL USE OF she
Mary
knew that
she
was happy.
In linguistics, the “full” noun referred to by a coreferential pronoun is called
the antecedent if it precedes, and the postcedent if it follows the pronoun.
The ambiguity between the indexical and the coreferential readings arises in
STAR-2 contents after parsing the incoming surface and before adjusting to the
hearer perspective (Sect. 10.3). No such ambiguity arises in a corresponding
STAR-0 content recording the agent's current observation because it is the
speaker who selects the intended reference (compare 10.1.5 and 10.1.6).
An indexical reference 4 to Suzy is illustrated by the interpretation of 11.3.1
as a STAR-0 content, showing the co-indexed STAR-0 proplet at the end:
11.3.4 I NDEXICAL STAR-0 REPRESENTATION AS A PROPLET SET
verb: happy
cat: v
sem: past
arg: ça
fnc: (know 89)
prn: 90
noun: Mary
cat: nm
sem: sg f
fnc: know
prn: 89
verb: know
cat: decl
sem: past
arg: Mary (happy 90)
prn: 89
noun: ça
cat: s3
sem: sg f
fnc: happy
prn: 90
S: Austin
T: 1974-09-12
A: Peter
3rd: Suzy
prn: 89
The STAR-0 proplet anchors the proposition to the circumstances in which
author Peter records the content. The crucial content value is the indexical ça ,
which points to the 3rd attribute with the value Suzy of the STAR-0 proplet.
When the agent computes a STAR-1 perspective towards this content for lan-
guage production, the indexical interpretation is realized as the pronoun she .
Next consider the coreferential interpretation of 11.3.1 as a STAR-0 content:
11.3.5 C OREFERENTIAL STAR-0 REPRESENTATION AS A PROPLET SET
verb: happy
cat: v
sem: past
arg: ça
fnc: (know 93)
prn: 94
noun: Mary
cat: nm
sem: sg f
fnc: know
prn: 93
verb: know
cat: decl
sem: past
arg: Mary (happy 94)
prn: 93
noun: ça
cat: s3
sem: sg f
fnc: happy
prn: 94
S: Austin
T: 1974-09-12
A: Peter
prn: 93
Here the STAR-0 contains no 3rd value for the interpretation of ça . Therefore,
this indexical is interpreted by the following inference:
4 Bosch (1986) uses the notions “syntactic reference” for our coreferential reference and “referential
reference” for our indexical reference.
 
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