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This approach of Givón’s is a linear, quantitative approach to participant reference, which in certain contexts is helpful. However, it fails to explain participants
that are either under- or over-coded. Also, it does not take into consideration the hierarchical structure of the text or the strategy of some discourses to code one participant
as more salient throughout an entire text.
2.2.2 Hierarchical approach to participant reference
According to Chafe 1987:42, paragraph junctures represent a cognitive shift, which is often manifested by “a significant change in scene, time, character
configuration, even structure, and the like.” Fox, with her studies on discourse and anaphora, shows that heavier coding on a referent correlates with certain structural
boundaries in a text 1987a, 1987b. Tomlin 1987 echoes these findings by stating, “the syntax of reference is directly a function of episodic or thematic boundaries at a relatively
local level” 1987:455. Hinds 1973 and Hinds and Hinds 1979 studied Japanese and found that paragraph boundaries constrained how participants were referenced.
Recognizing that these boundaries exist and influence participant reference forms provides another dimension for analyzing the participant reference system.
2.2.3 Cognitive approach to participant reference
A third approach for looking at participant reference is from the cognitive science background. Talmy 1995:424 succinctly summarizes the impact that cognition can have
on a discourse.
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The cultures and subcultures in which the producers and experiencers of narratives cognitively participate can constitute a largely coherent cognitive
system that informs much of the conceptual structure, affectual structure, presuppositions, values, and in general, the ‘world view’ of those individuals.
This culturally based cognitive system within the psychological organization of these individuals can affect or determine a set of narrative characteristics.
In their chapter on discourse strategies, van Dijk and Kintsch 1983 include a section on cultural strategies. They partially define this term 1983:81 as knowledge about different
geographical locations, different social structure, different communicative events, different styles and rhetorics, different conceptual ordering of the world and society, etc.
While the speaker controls the speech act, it is performed in his own cultural context. Some areas where cultural context and linguistic forms intersect in Bunong are
kinship terms of address and the hierarchical levels they denote within their society, common geographic locales expressed with deictics, and well-known supernatural or
other figures in the folklore that are considered common knowledge. This cultural context affects the speaker’s choice of referring expressions and what the speaker believes to be
identifiable for the hearer. For someone outside the culture looking in and studying the language, it is important to understand the speaker’s perspective to correctly identify the
cognitive status a referent may have. Foley and Van Valin’s 1984:324 description of Southeastern and Eastern Asian languages’ “discourse cohesion system” states what is
also true for Bunong:
Zero anaphora is heavily used in these languages but assignment of coreference is often determined by the subtle use of sociolinguistic variables and is not
directly signaled in the linguistic form. In particular, honorific speech levels such as those found in Japanese and Korean can be exploited for the purpose of
indirectly specifying reference.
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In Li and Thompson’s 1979:320 study of Chinese, they found that “The fundamental strategy in the interpretation of zero-pronouns in Chinese discourse, then, is
inference on the basis of pragmatic information provided by the discourse and our knowledge of the world.”
Gundel et al. 1993 studied the correlation between the cognitive status of a referent and the form of the referring expression and then applied their theory cross-
linguistically for Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Their main premise 1993:274 is that “different determiners and pronominal forms conventionally
signal different cognitive states, thereby enabling the addressee to restrict the set of possible referents.” They found that six cognitive statuses were relevant in determining
the referring expression. They represented these cognitive statuses in a givenness hierarchy shown in Figure 3.
In focus
activated familiar
uniquely identifiable
referential type
identifiable {it}
N this
this that
{that N} {the N}
{indefinite this N} {a N}
Figure 3: Givenness hierarchy Gundel et al. 1993:275
Each status, as one goes further to the left, entails all the lower statuses on the right. From their findings, the statuses were not mutually exclusive; rather, one status
implied all of the lower statuses, thereby creating an implicational hierarchy. Rosén 1996 and Dyvik 1984 considered not only the referential givenness of a
constituent, but also what Dyvik terms relational givenness. Dyvik 1984:8 defines
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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
