factors do affect the accessibility of dependent referents. If a scene involved a given activity that nor- mally takes a maximum of two hours, a shift of time longer than two hours would make it difficult to
retrieve a scenario dependent participant. For example, in a scene in a movie house the watching of a film will take a couple of hours. A reference to the projectionist is difficult to retrieve if a time phrase
like “seven hours later” is used in the next sentence. Anderson, Sanford, and Garrod also normalized spatial distance constraints for different activities and found they worked the same way.
Givón has proposed that there are action or thematic continuity breaks that are often associated with the same referential devices that are used for long distance anaphora 1983a, 1983c. In particular he identi-
fies three changes besides the change of major participant that may be important: location, time, and se- quential action. Givón distinguishes sequential action that breaks off from a given action sequence and
starts a new sequence, from sequential action that is temporarily broken off for some type of interjection and then resumes the same sequence Givón 1983a:158–159. Givón found a correlation between long dis-
tance markers and thematic disjunction. In his study he made impressionistic judgments of where the disjunctions were and at what level, based on changes in time space and actions.
While impressionistic judgments can be useful, it would be better to code the amounts of disjunction if possible, or the size of spatial or temporal shift. This could be done on an absolute scale, of some-
thing like hours and minutes for time and some linear measure for space. However, this is neither prac- tical nor theoretically desirable. It is not practical because stories rarely contain closely quantified
temporal or spatial measures. Rather, they will contain things like that night, tomorrow, later, now, or at the store, on the hill, in his garden. There is no practical way to turn these into discrete time or distance
measures. The reason that the strict scalar measures are not theoretically desirable is that using them would assume that all episodes have the same size boundaries. Obviously spatial boundaries measured
in a linear measure for in the park are much larger than in his room. The point of Anderson, Garrod, and Sanford’s 1983 work is that different scenarios have different normal space and time boundaries as-
sociated with them. What they found is that going well beyond the normal boundaries invoked the change. This means that the changes must be relative to what is expected.
When working on texts that have independently established scenarios with normalized temporal and spatial boundaries, we can use those boundaries to determine when a character has moved out of a
scenario. But it is difficult to apply this approach to narratives that are not dependent on clear scenar- ios, either because the normalized temporal and spatial boundaries have not been determined, or the
story is just not organized into discrete scenarios. When we are unable to establish the boundaries in- dependently, we either rely on impressionistic judgment or group all the boundary types together.
This second choice is what I do in this work. The exact mechanisms will be discussed in chapter 4.
3.3.3 Memorial activation models
The term activation is not commonly known by many linguists as it deals with mental activity and not language per se. Activation, however, is key to understanding one of the current classes of models
of reference. By activation I mean the ease of accessibility a person has to a concept in his mind. If something is highly active it is easier for the person to be able to work with the concept. The more ac-
tive the concept is the easierquicker it is to access or work with. Chafe has redefined his terms “given” and “new” in terms of “activation,” with “given” being defined as “already active” and “new” as “pre-
viously inactive.” Chafe also adds the term “accessible,” defining it as “previously semi-active” 1987:22. Chafe’s terms overlap in some areas with the definition I am using, but he is more precisely
describing the activation level of his former terms than he is defining them. A more formal approach is that of Gernsbacher, who takes the notion of activation to the cellular level where an individual brain
cell is activated and enhances or suppresses the activation of other brain cells 1990:2. Operationally, activation is indicated in psychology by faster response times to word probes. It is clear that this notion
of activation is related to one’s cognitive ability to access concepts or objects. While items can be acti- vated without entering consciousness, increasing activation beyond a certain threshold will have a
conscious effect. Within this definition, activation is a continuous variable and does not have binary or trinary levels. Items can be more or less active than other items in the mind of the language producer
and the language comprehender. In this way something is not active, accessible or inactive, but rather one thing is more or less active than another.
54 The Rationale for Different Referential Forms
Tomlin and Pu 1991 move from a strict episode accounting of reference to one based on activation. In this view a noun is chosen if a given referent is believed to be inactive in a comprehender’s mind, or
just in case it might be. This is congruent with claims by Chafe 1980a that pronouns or zero anaphora typically are used for active referents, and nouns are used for inactive or semi-active referents. Chafe’s
two nonactive categories are differentiated from each other primarily based on the length of pause a speaker uses before using one or the other category. An inactive concept has a longer preceding pause
then a semi-active concept.
The episode based models and the activation model make different claims about the root causes of noun and pronoun use. In one, the use of a noun is used to mark the beginning of a new episode. In the
other, the shift to a new episode causes a deactivation of referents and forces a noun to reactivate the referent. The current production paradigms cannot conclusively distinguish between the two compet-
ing models. So far the investigators on both sides manipulate the events a speaker sees and record ei- ther as an on-line report or a delayed report. Clancy 1980 points out that both a listener based
strategy and a speaker based strategy of placement of nouns at episode boundaries instead of pronouns is defensible. In the listener based strategy the speaker uses the nouns to mark the start of a new epi-
sode, while in the speaker based strategy the start of a new episode forces a reactivation of the referent causing the selection of a noun.
Since both speaker based and listener oriented strategies lead to the same effect, it seems likely that the two factors reinforce one another during the course of learning how to tell an effective
narrative. Clancy 1980:172–173
If a speaker has trouble maintaining activation across episode boundaries as Chafe 1980a claims and Clancy 1980 suggests as one possible explanation, it is reasonable to assume that listeners would
have the same if not a worse problem. The language comprehender does not have the knowledge of where the discourse is going; he can only infer it based on what the language producer has transmitted
to him. This gives a possibility to check the claims made for activation versus episode boundaries. If a language comprehender can be shown to have a high activation across episode boundaries where a
language producer uses a noun, or conversely if a language comprehender can be shown to have a low activation where a language producer uses a pronoun, then it would be reasonable to conclude that ac-
tivation is not causally related to the problem of reference choice.
Anderson, Garrod, and Sanford’s work 1983 gives credence to both points of view. They found that the status of certain referents highly topical ones allowed them to be realized by a pronoun across ep-
isode boundaries, which supports the view that the use of a noun at the start of an episode boundary is for a boundary signal. The inability to use a pronoun for an episode dependent participant supports the
view of the activation hypothesis in that the boundary seems to cause a loss of activation for the dependent participant.
Memorial activation fits in well with the pure episode approach, and subsumes the advantages of the recency approach. Being a more powerful model it is more difficult to find data that will disprove it.
For example, it does not require that all episode boundaries cause a reactivation with a nominal, al- though it does not preclude it. Memorial activation as a model does make a very specific claim. It pre-
dicts that current activation is the only determiner of referential form. This means that some measure or measures of activation should be able to be uniquely associated with each referential form. It also
predicts that no effect should be demonstrable for cataphoric usage. And further, it predicts that all in- active referents must be introduced by nominals. The Olo data shows that each of these claims are not
supported. This is not because they are completely wrong, but rather because they insist on only looking at the current state with no regard for any future plans.
3.3.4 Prominence effects
