Publications on Referring Expressions

Directly and Indirectly Anaphoric Pronouns

This paper reports on a study of pronouns this, that, and it in articles in the New York Times, testing the following hypotheses: (1) the pronoun it requires its referent to be in the addressee’s focus of attention; demonstrative pronouns only require activation; (2) the anaphoric relation between it and its antecedent tends to be direct (co-referential); the relation between a demonstrative pronoun and its antecedent tends to be indirect (non-coreferential).

Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg, and Ron Zacharski. 2007. Directly and Indirectly Anaphoric Demonstrative and Personal Pronouns in Newspaper Articles.  Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (pdf)

The Grammar-Pragmatics Interface

This book, edited by Nancy Hedberg and me, came out mid 2007. The book celebrates the life and work of Jeanette K. Gundel with papers by her friends and colleagues. The book has a strong theme: the grammar-pragmatics interface, and it is oriented around Jeanette K. Gundel’s ideas on that theme. The first section is centrally concerned with the topic-comment distinction. The second section discusses from aspects of reference directly related to the Givenness Hierarchy The third section moves from describing a close relation between register and form of referring expression through the discourse grammar of apologies to the crucially social discussion of co-constructional utterances that are composed of hearer plus speaker contributions to the discourse.

Hedberg, Nancy, and Ron Zacharski. 2007. The Grammer-Pragmatics Interface: Essays in Honor of Jeanette K. Gundel. John Benjamins Publishing. [Amazon] (The table of contents and the introductory chapter are available in pdf)

Pronouns without NP Antecedents

Pronouns without explicit noun phrase antecedents pose a problem for any theory of reference resolution. We report here on an empirical study of such pronouns in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, a corpus of spontaneous, casual conversation. In this paper we focus on some problematic subclasses of pronouns which could be analyzed as either referring to entities of various degrees of abstractness that were introduced by or implied in previous discourse, or as non-referential, including pleonastic.

Gundel, Jeanette, Nancy Hedberg, and Ron Zacharski. 2005. Pronouns without NP Antecedents: How do we know when a pronoun is referential. Anaphora Processing: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Modelling, ed. by Antonio Branco, Tony McEnery, and Ruslan Mitkov. John Benjamins, 351-364. (pdf)

Demonstrative pronouns in natural discourse.

We examine demonstrative pronouns in a portion of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English and propose a coding scheme that classifies pronouns with nominal as well as non-nominal antecedents into direct and indirect, depending on whether their referent is the same as the referent/denotation of the antecedent. In agreement with previous studies, we find that demonstratives more often have non-NP antecedents than NP-antecedents, the opposite pattern from that of the personal pronouns. Since anaphoric relationships involving non=NP antecedents are more frequently indirect, our scheme allows for a principled explanation for the difference in distribution patterns of demonstratives compared with personal pronouns. We propose that the indirect anaphoric cases are more accessible to reference with demonstratives because, demonstratives only require the referent to be activated, not necessarily in focus.

Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2004. Demonstrative Pronouns in Natural Discourse. Proceedings of DAARC-2004 (the Fifth Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium), Sao Miguel, Portugal, Sept. 23-24, 2004 (pdf)

Definite Descriptions and Cognitive Status in English: Why Accommodation is Unnecessary

A commonly held view of English definite articles is that they signal that the referent of an NP is familiar to the addressee. However, it is well known that not all definite article phrases meet this familiarity requirement. In this paper we argue that the Givenness Hierarchy framework provides an insightful account of all uses of definite article phrases without requiring an appeal to accommodation. Such an account provides a unified treatment of definite article phrases, including demonstrative phrases and personal pronouns, while at the same time distinguishing among them in a principled way. This proposal is supported by results of a corpus-based examination of the use of definite articles and by an examination of cleft presuppositions.

Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2001. “Cognitive Status and Definite Descriptions in English: Why Accommodation is Unnecessary.” English Language and Linguistics 5. 273-295. (pdf)

Statut cognitif et forme des anaphoriques indirects

The prototypical anaphoric expression is one which is interpreted as coreferential with a previous expression in the discourse. However, a nominal phrase may also be ‘linked’ to the previous discourse without being corefential with a previous expression and we refer to such expressions as ‘indirect anaphors’. This paper reports on an investigation of the conditions under which pronouns and demonstrative phrases can occur as indirect anaphors.

Jeanette Gundel, Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2000.
Verbum 22.79-102. (French PDF) (English PDF)