will reflect the level of current activation. This will result in differences involving various discourse boundaries as well as referential distance.
3.6 Summary
In this chapter I have presented my view of referential form as a cognitive mechanism that is used to enhance and suppress the different participants in a narrative. We have laid the philosophical founda-
tion for a study of reference and surveyed different models that attempt to account for why there are different forms of reference in a discourse. Of these, the idea of activation is the most promising. The
treatment I am following, goal oriented activation, is different from previous work, in that I propose that the different referential forms are used to adjust the activation levels of the different participants
not simply because of past activation.
3.6 Summary 61
4 Methods
4.1 Methods
In chapter 3 I proposed a general cognitive approach to the problems of the choice of referential form. While this is not in itself unusual, it is unusual to apply such an approach to a text database in a little
known language. Most investigators who take a cognitive approach to reference quantify some response of subjects in a controlled experiment, usually by either measuring reaction or reading times. I am not reject-
ing this methodology, although I am not employing it in this present study. Rather I am employing the in- sights gained by the methodology in the study of forms of reference in a text database. This is an important
step in the advancement of the study of reference. If the cognitive effects of manipulation of referential form are real, they need to be demonstrable outside of the controlled conditions of the laboratory. They
also need to be applied to a wide variety of languages where the more controlled experimental approach would be extremely difficult to implement and often culturally inappropriate Du Bois 1980b. By taking
the ideas about activation out of the laboratory and applying them to a minority language, I hope to make them accessible to field linguists who are unfamiliar with cognitive studies. This is not a step into com-
pletely uncharted waters. Givón’s work 1983a, 1983e makes use of cognitive principles, and he argues that referential management involves activation 1990.
While most psycholinguistic studies have been conducted in English, there is no reason to believe that the effects found by researchers in English are not in essence true of other languages. In fact, the
crosslinguistic studies done by Givón and the other contributors to the volume on topic continuity Givón 1983b, and those done by Chafe and his colleagues in the Pear Film paradigm Chafe 1980b,
point to remarkable crosslinguistic consistency in the use of referential forms for specific tasks. For this reason I believe that the use of the different referential forms in Olo will have essentially the same ef-
fect in enhancing and suppressing referents as the similar forms do in English.
My theoretical claim is that the choice of referential form is based not only on past activation levels, but also according to the activation level the language producer wants to have at the end of the clause
for building the next clause. The choice of referential form is used to manipulate the comprehender’s understanding of the unfolding of the discourse and of the relative importance of one participant to an-
other in not only the specific episode, but in the narrative in general. Evidence that will support this claim is the use of referential forms that do not cause a large shift in activation to refer to very minor
characters, particularly at their introduction. A second piece of evidence is that some forms will be se- lected based on the planned persistence of the topic. A third piece of evidence is important characters
being kept more active than nonimportant characters or props. Finally, an important piece of evidence will be if some participants can be maintained across episode boundaries. The theory can be consid-
ered false if either a pure recency, prominence, or episode account would account for more of the data than my approach.
63
Because this study is text based, the normally used measurements of activation
1
are not possible. From psycholinguistic studies we can estimate the impact on activation of the different referential de-
vices and we can quantify other parameters of the text. Measurements are made of referential distance RD and topic persistence TP. The values for RD and TP can be compared to a variety of previous
works
2
as part of the crosslinguistic typology, although there have been changes in the exact imple- mentation of the referential distance methodology. In addition, the referential forms are examined in
the light of changes in time, space, and event consistency.
4.2 The Textual Data
