Such communication event overtly stated the text

On a more general note with respect to reference, consider the sentence The Iliad was written not by Homer but by another man with the same name.71We will not discuss the processing of the ellipsis in this sentence (see Section 8.4.4 for a discussion of treating this phenomenon). After the ellipsis is processed, the sentence will look as follows: Iliad was not written by Homer, Iliad was written by a different man whose name was Homer. The meanings of the first mention of Homer and Iliad are instantiated from the concepts HUMAN and BOOK, respectively. Just like JAPAN and USA in (18), they will be referred to by name in the TMR. The second mention of Homer will be represented “on general principles,” that is, using a numbered instance of HUMAN, with all the properties attested in the text overtly listed. There are two event instances referred to in the sen-tence, both of them instances of AUTHOR-EVENT.

Another example of special representation strategy is questions and commands. In fact, to deal with this issue, we must first better understand how we are treating assertions. All our examples so far have been assertions, though we have not characterized them as such, as there was nothing with which to compare them. In linguistic and philosophical theory, assertions, questions and commands are types of illocutionary acts, or less formally, speech acts (Austin 1962, Searle 1969, 1975). This brings about the general issue of how to treat speech acts in TMRs.

For questions and commands, similarly, also the implicit communication event must be repre-sented in order to characterize the speech act correctly. We represent questions using values of the ontological concept REQUEST-INFORMATION with its theme filled by the element about which the question is asked. If the latter is the value of a property of a concept instance, then this is a special question about the filler of this property. For example, the question Who won the match? is repre-sented as: