Chapter 9
Are referent introductions sensitive to forward planning in discourse?
Evidence from Multi-CAST
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.
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