Major themes of the study

The last ten years have seen a tremendous upsurge in work on discourse production and comprehension, correlated with a growing concern in a variety of disciplines with language as it is used in context. Because of its fundamental place in the understanding of memory, discourse structure and semantic interpretation, anaphora has been the focus of much of this research (e.g. Grosz 1977; Reichman 1981; Sidner 1983; Tyler and Marslen-Wilson 1982; Webber 1983; Givón 1983; Halliday and Hasan 1976; Bosch 1983; Linde 1979; Reinhart 1983). Central to this work has been the belief that there is a strong relationship between the flow of information in a text, the structure of the text, and use of anaphora. A recurrent, and intuitively appealing, finding of this work is that referents which are “in focus” or “in the hearer's consciousness” can be pronominalized, where focus or consciousness are operationalized in terms of the discourse structure (see in particular Grosz 1977 and Reichman 1981).

The present study holds to this interpretation of the relationship between discourse structure and anaphora. One of the themes that runs through this study is that any treatment of anaphora must seek its understanding in the hierarchical structure of the text-type being used as a source of data. Texts may be produced and heard/read in a linear fashion, but they are designed and understood hierarchically, and this fact has dramatic consequences for the linguistic coding employed.