Traditionally, pronouns are treated as ambiguous between bound and
demonstrative uses. Bound uses are non-referential and function as bound variables,
and demonstrative uses are referential and take as a semantic value their referent, an
object picked out jointly by linguistic meaning and a further cue—an accompanying
demonstration, an appropriate and adequately transparent speaker’s intention, or both.
In this paper, we challenge tradition and argue that both demonstrative and bound
pronouns are dependent on, and co-vary with, antecedent expressions. Moreover, the
semantic value of a pronoun is never determined, even partly, by extra-linguistic cues;
it is fixed, invariably and unambiguously, by features of its context of use governed
entirely by linguistic rules. We exploit the mechanisms of Centering and Coherence
theories to develop a precise and general meta-semantics for pronouns, according to
which the semantic value of a pronoun is determined by what is at the center of attention
in a coherent discourse. Since the notions of attention and coherence are, we argue,
governed by linguistic rules, we can give a uniform analysis of pronoun resolution that

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• Discourse and logical form: pronouns, attention and coherence