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relational givenness as “the relationship between the referent and the state or process denoted by the verb.” Rosén 1996:258 explains that while referential givenness restricts
the possible referents, it is relational givenness that provides the necessary clues to correctly identify the referent. In her research on Vietnamese, which has no inflectional
morphology and a widespread use of “empty pronouns,” or zero anaphora, Rosén shows how vital relational givenness is, especially when one sentence contains multiple
instances of zero anaphora. She states 1996:255 that the use of an empty pronoun, or zero anaphora, signals “that the speaker is so certain that the propositional content of the
utterance makes clear which referent to supply for a certain syntactic argument of a verb that no syntactic argument at all needs to be expressed.” In order for a listener to
correctly identify a referent of an empty pronoun through relational givenness, Rosén 1996:261 states that it
depends on the listener’s ability to search the immediately preceding context and find a proposition that is so similar to the proposition expressed in the utterance
with empty pronouns that it may be pragmatically inferred that the relation between referents and predicates is the same in both cases.
2.2.4 Information structure, a pragmatic approach
Not only are the lexical items used for the referring expression important for examining participant reference, but also the way the information is presented in
conjunction with its cognitive status. Lambrecht’s seminal work 1994, Information Structure and Sentence Form
, provides many insightful comments on how information is presented and what is conveyed by its form and grammatical structure. One definition of
information structure that he gives is 1994:3: “information structure is concerned with
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the form of utterances in relation to assumed mental states of speakers and hearers.” The three most important categories that information structure addresses are 1994:6: 1
presupposition and assertion, 2 identifiability and activation, and 3 topic and focus. With regard to topic, Lambrecht proposes a Topic Acceptability Scale 1994:165 that
relates the cognitive status of a referent and the likelihood of it becoming a topic.
active most acceptable
accessible unused
brand-new anchored brand-new unanchored
least acceptable
Figure 4: Topic acceptability scale
In order for a referent to move up the topic acceptability scale and become more acceptable as a topic, Lambrecht discusses two topic-promoting constructions. The first is
the presentational construction and the second, a left- or right-dislocation.
2.2.5 Sequential default and VIP approach to participant reference
Dooley and Levinsohn 2001:112 give three tasks that a participant reference system must accomplish: 1 semantic—identify participants unambiguously, 2
discourse-pragmatic—signal activation status and prominence, and 3 processing— overcome disruptions in information flow. For a linguist studying a language, she wants
to understand how these tasks are accomplished within a text. To uncover the hows, Dooley and Levinsohn propose two different methods to address this issue. The first
method, which they call the
S
EQUENTIAL
D
EFAULT STRATEGY
, looks at how a referent is coded from one clause to the next. The authors recognize that this approach does not take
into consideration the structure of the discourse. The second method is the Very
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Important Participant VIP strategy which accounts for one referent being more prominent than all the others, and is marked in a special way to reflect this status. This
type of marking on a participant reference can take place on a global level, throughout an entire text, or just on a local level.
In applying the strategies described above, charts are made of all the participants and their respective grammatical markings. This chart is then used to determine a default
encoding depending on the syntactic environment. Once a default is established which often is a result of some sequential strategy, then special cases of under- or over-coding
can be identified. Cases of under- or over-coding can possibly be explained by determining if there is a VIP that informs the referring expressions for a particular
participant.
2.2.6 Discourse profile and operations approach to participant reference
