Introduction Developing a computational account of event reference requires solution to a number of difficult problems, not least of which is characterizing the phenomenon itself. From a listener's point of view, eveni reference encompasses both the task of building up a structured model of the events and situations underlying a given text and the task of interpreting subsequent references to these events and situations afterwards. A computational approach to these tasks requires at least (1) a

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... characterization of the information that an individual clause may convey about an event or situation; (2) a characterization of explicit clues a text gives as to how the pieces described in individual clauses fit together (assuming, as I do, that this does not rely solely on world knowledge; (3) an account of what the listener does in processing an explicit event reference; (4) a characterization of what events and situations are available for explicit reference; and (5) a procedure for choosing among possible ways of resolving an explicit event reference.