Figure 6. The mental spaces set up by the sentence Mary thinks that John smokes.-Representing Mental Spaces and Dynamics of Natural Language Semantics

<p>The proper nouns Mary and John setup a base space (B). By the help of background<br> knowledge and activated frames we know that they are names of female and male humans. Not<br> having access to the previous discourse, we also consider their existence presupposed. The SVSB<br> Mary thinks that sets up a belief space (L) relative to space B (Figure 6). The identity connector<br> maintains the referential link between elements a and a ׳ both referring to the same person.</p>