means that some referents with a high level of importance in a particular passage may not show much in the way of persistence because they are introduced at the end of a passage.
Cognitively the continued occurrence of a referent will enhance the activation of that referent and suppress the activation of other referents.
5
This will increase the activation of the persistent referent in relation to all other participants. This allows topic persistence to be used as an estimate of future acti-
vation levels. For this reason, if different topic persistence levels can be associated with different refer- ential forms, then the conclusion that language producers use specific forms to achieve future goals as
stated in the model of Goal Oriented Activation is supported.
4.5.3 Ranking of participants
It is important to establish the ranking of participants in the stories independent of their referential form, because important referents are treated differently than episodescenario dependent partici-
pants Anderson, Garrod, and Sanford 1983. The ranking of participants can be done in a number of different fashions. One of the first ways is the method of introduction. Participants introduced with
proper names are in general more likely to be important than unnamed participants 1983, Fleming 1978. The problem with using the form of introduction is that the definition is related to the topic un-
der investigation, that of referential form, and as such involves circularity.
Olo narratives identify the most important participant by telling who or what the story is about in the first line. An example of this is given in 148, the first line of the story Amerika.
148 ki
nampli il
p-iti Amerika,
I bring.out.3p
words 3p-of
America Amerika
sungoi lolpopo
p-epe, America
long.time fight.
CNT
3p-this I am telling the story of America. A long time ago America fought here,
This, when it occurs, allows the identification of the most important referent. It would be good to have other means to rank all the referents. It is reasonable to assume that characters with high overall fre-
quency are important over the whole narrative, while characters with low overall frequency are not as important. It is more difficult to make conclusions about mid-frequency referents. Since very impor-
tant referents and unimportant referents are expected to be at opposite ends of the frequency scale, and should hopefully show some difference in referential forms if importance matters to referential
form, I devised a way to separate them from each other and from referents that possibly are not at the same importance level. This was done by looking at the two ends of the frequency scale, those that oc-
curred three or less times and those that occurred twenty or more times. This differentiation, while not exact, is based on the assumption that as a general rule important participants occur more frequently
than unimportant referents.
4.7 Summary
