Are referent introductions sensitive to forward planning in discourse?

Abstract

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.