Coreference and disjoint reference in the semantics of narrative dance

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory production study of Bharatanatyam, a figurative
(narrative) dance. We investigate the encoding of coreference vs. disjoint reference in this
dance and argue that a formal semantics of narrative dance can be modeled in line with
Abusch’s (2013, 2014, 2015) semantics of visual narrative (drawing also on Schlenker’s,
2017a, approach to music semantics). A main finding of our investigation is that larger-level
group-boundaries (Charnavel, 2016) can be seen as triggers for discontinuity inferences
(possibly involving the dynamic shift from one salient entity to another).
Keywords: co-reference, disjoint reference, dance semantics, iconic semantics, picture
semantics.