6

Evoked Discourse Entities

• Sometimes a DE is not explicitly mentioned previously, but rather introduced or evoked (like the front seat in 1c).

• The item referred to may not be identified precisely:

  8a	John bought a car[i] yesterday.
  8b	It[i] was very expensive.

• Neither speaker nor hearer may be able to identify the car (we can't say that it is CAR56 in our knowledge base (KB).)