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Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective
Edited by Alessandra Barotto and Simone Mattiola
[Studies in Language Companion Series 227] 2023
► pp. 231–268

Chapter 9
Are referent introductions sensitive to forward planning in discourse?

Evidence from Multi-CAST

| University of Zurich
| University of Bamberg
| University of Bamberg
| University of Freiburg | Australian National University | ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

It has been argued that speakers employ morphosyntactic structures such as presentationals and left-dislocations (Lambrecht 1994) to establish new entities in discourse due to considerations of referent accessibility vis-à-vis event processing (Du Bois 1987; Chafe 1987). We here investigate whether introductions are sensitive to the salience of the discourse referent in subsequent discourse (Himmelmann 1996; Lichtenberk 1996). This hypothesis is tested against spoken corpus data from twelve diverse languages. While the use of specific morphosyntactic structures does correlate with discourse prominence, humanness has a much stronger effect. Subsequent discourse salience is hence not the chief determinant of the syntactic positions of new mentions; the convergence of humanness and semantic role associations in specific syntactic positions better explains the attested patterns.

Keywords: reference processing, grammatical relations, discourse structure, thematic prominence, discourse topic, referent introduction, corpus-based typology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: Building a multilingual corpus for typological research in discourse and grammar
    • 2.1Multi-CAST corpus building and corpus composition
    • 2.2Multi-CAST corpus annotations
  • 3.Case study: Patterns of referent introduction vis-à-vis their discourse salience
    • 3.1Referent introduction as a challenge to processing
    • 3.2Establishing new referents for subsequent discourse
      • 3.2.1Role of introductions by frequency in immediate subsequent discourse
      • 3.2.2Role of introductions by overall discourse frequency
      • 3.2.3Role of introductions by humanness
      • 3.2.4Discussion
  • 4.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 1 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.227.09sch
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