My mind is not working very well today. I'm trying to figure out when to substitute a pronoun for a proper noun. We certainly want to use the proper noun in the first sentence of every tale. However, when ziTale > 0, we should assume substitution. But there are exceptions. My goal in this essay is to articulate those exceptions.
Awk, my brain is mush...
The first exception arises when we have more than one pronoun of the same gender. Most commonly this would be the Subject and DirObject having the same gender. But it could also arise if there's a Character1 or Character2 actor involved, in which case we'd want to continue using the genderly distinct pronoun, but would need to specify one of the two same-gender characters. The rule here should be: if two characters share the same gender, spell out the name of the earlier-appearing character, and use a pronoun for the other. Hmm, this could backfire. Examples of three-character atoms:
This tale is about Chris, Mary, and John.
Chris gave Mary John's transcript.
He gave her his transcript.
Chris gave her his transcript.
Chris gave her John's transcript.
Given the difficulties the storybuilder will have, I think we should take the more conservative route here: if there are two same-gender characters in the atom, we use full names.
OK, we shall refer to a character whose gender is shared by somebody else in the tale as "compromised". Now, what if a character is compromised in the tale but not in a particular atom? Can I be certain that the sense of the atom would always preclude ambiguity? Example:
This tale is about Chris, Mary, and John.
Chris gave her John's transcript.
She was so pleased with the transcript that she kissed him.
Nope, doesn't work. Compromise extends through the entire tale. But what if a tale has a kind of drift to it? What if it starts off exclusively on Chris and Mary, then John enters the picture, then Chris exits the picture? Shouldn't compromise have some sort of short range?
Yes. Compromise should extend to one atom before and after any explicitly compromising atom, but no further.
So how do we calculate this? I suppose that the full-blown route is to carry out an initial pass in which we establish all the characters, set up tables of compromise values, and so on. This strikes me as overkill. A more straightforward approach is to examine the characters in an atom, and then examine the preceeding and following atoms for compromises. This, however, does seem to get me into an apparent quandary: do I really need to examine a future atom to determine if the current atom is compromised? Wouldn't the compromising only apply in one direction temporally? Another example:
Mary asked Chris for a favor.
He agreed to her request.
Chris gave her John's transcript.
She was so pleased with the transcript that she kissed him.
My point here is that the compromised nature of sentence #3 should not extend backwards to sentence #2. After all, language itself does not rely on lookahead; we parse each sentence based on context established to date. However, the compromised nature of sentence #3 does extend forward to sentence #4.
This means that I must keep track of the previous atom's compromises, and OR them with those of the current atom.