Cognitive Status and the form of Referring Expressions in Discourse

Abstract

In this chapter a case is made for six implicationally related cognitive statuses relevant for explicating the use of referring expressions in natural language discourse. These statuses are the conventional meanings signaled by determiners and pronouns, and interaction of the statuses with general conversational principles such as Grice’s Maxim of Quantity accounts for the actual distribution and interpretation of forms when necessary conditions for the use of more than one form are met. This proposal is supported by an empirical study of the distribution of referring expressions in naturally occurring discourse in five languages: English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.

The effects of utterance timing and stimulation of left prefrontal cortex on the production of referential expressions

“…These choices are heavily constrained by the discourse context. Pronouns tend to refer to recently mentioned and accessible entities (Ariel, 1990, 2001; Arnold, 1998, 2008, 2010; Chafe, 1976; Gundel et al, 1993; Givon, 1983), and elliptical (zero) constructions like … and Ø moves right two blocks are usually restricted to consecutive utterances with a repeated subject. Yet the context does not provide a categorical, inflexible constraint, and often in the same context multiple forms sound acceptable.…”

The Influence of Animacy, Givenness, and Focus on Object Order in Croatian Ditransitives

“…Givenness does not seem to be a strong enough factor that would permit us to claim that Croatian follows the given>new principle, even though givenness does have an effect; hence, we place the relevance of givenness along the lines of what Sim ık, Wierzba & Kamali (2014) have claimed for Czech. Perhaps, in order to observe a more sound effect of givenness, arguments that are higher in the Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski 1993), such as discourse topics, should also be considered.…”

First Language Influence on Second Language Offline and Online Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

“…Ambiguous pronoun resolution has been shown to be governed by an interplay of syntactic, semantic, and discourse‐related factors across languages (for an overview, see de la Fuente, Hemforth, Colonna, & Schimke, ). One important factor is the level of discourse salience of the potential antecedents of a pronominal form, which has been claimed to be inversely related to its explicitness (Ariel, ; Givón, ; Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski, ). This means that the more reduced the form of reference, the more likely it will be interpreted as referring to the most salient antecedent.…”