better thinking of a light dimmer or multiple dimmers. Activating one concept does not automatically turn off all others. It may turn them down. Furthermore using a pronoun does not turn up the activa-
tion of the referent, it turns down the others. Just as a lighting designer can control the amount of light each actor on a stage gets and so suggest the amount of attention to be paid to any given actor, a lan-
guage producer by using different referential devices can suggest the amount of attention to be paid to any individual participant. And much as the lighting designer has to work within the current
limitations of his equipment, so too the language comprehender does not have an unlimited amount of mental processing power to devote to all the different participants.
3.5 Goal Oriented Activation
I propose that the choice of referential form is based not just on the current activation level, before the utterance is made, but also on the status of the participant that the speaker wants to achieve. The
choice of referential form is not determined simply by how active the participant is in the mind of the comprehender, but also by how active the speaker wants this particular referent to be vis-á-vis all
other participants. The speaker takes into account his estimate of the activation levels in the mind of the hearer and uses the appropriate device to change the activation to the level he wants the hearer to
have at the end of the sentence. This builds from the base of memorial activation, in that the current level of activation is estimated and then an appropriate form is chosen, but it adds the component of
planning and goals. The production of each sentence then builds on the previous sentence and lays the foundation for the next sentence. The form of reference chosen should ideally unambiguously denote
the participants and adjust the relative activation of the participant vis-á-vis all the other partici- pants. The basic instructions are summarized in table 3.3. The fourth instruction is a combination of
instructions two and three.
Table 3.3. Basic activation instructions 1 do nothing to the activation levels of all participants
2 lower the activation of participants not referred to 3 raise the activation of the participant referred to
4 raise the activation of the referenced participant and lower the
activation of all other participants The use of these referential devices is cognitively based and can be conventionalized. The traditional
stylized narratives of Mambila have one referent with overarching importance, and after introduction it is marked by a zero for most of the discourse. In English narratives important referents are normally
marked out for each episode by a nominal. Following the nominal and depending on how the language producer ranks the different participants, the important referent can continue through the rest of the
discourse using a minimal device such as a pronoun or a zero. In cases where two referents compete in importance they will be referenced in similar ways.
When a speaker begins to tell a story he has a mental model of the set of events that he wants to relate. As well as the mental model of the events, the speaker has reasons for telling a particular story. He has
goals that he wants to achieve. A speaker does not simply pass on to his audience “just the facts,” but also his perception of the facts. The telling of a story is often used to influence the audience to see the world in
the same way as the speaker. The speaker has not only a mental model of a set of events, but also a view- point. This viewpoint is manifested in the selection of which of the events to be retold as well as the choice
of what participant to give background information on Kim 1993. It is my contention that the choice of referential form is also influenced by this viewpoint. A given participant can be made more prominent,
that is active, and other participants less active by judicious choice of referential forms.
In the model given in figure 3.1, I give a simplified cognitive model for how a discourse is pro- duced.
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In this model a speaker has a mental model of a set of events that contains representations of
3.4 The cognitive effects of reference forms 59
6
This model owes much to the work of Ilah Fleming 1978, who over the course of many years influenced me both by writing and in personal communication.
the participants and the events. The speaker wants to transfer this model to the audience. The mental model is not real in that it was constructed by the speaker according to his perceptions, biases, and be-
liefs. At this stage all participants are individuals. The first step in the packaging of the model is the se- lection of the information to be transmitted. This is the step where different participants are combined
into groups. This is also the point where the appropriate referring expression is chosen. This includes the choice of nominal versus pronominal forms, as well as the different subtypes of each form. This is
essentially a semantic stage. The third stage is to transfer this according to the rule governed patterns of syntax,
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and then to produce the text artifact. The text artifact can be either sound phonetic or written graphemic.
A mental modal of a
set of events Selection of
lexical expressions
Syntax Text artifact
Figure 3.1. Model of discourse production. Various things have been left out of the model for simplicitys sake. The first is that the model of
mental events includes the goals of the communicator. These can be expressed directly in the right- ward boxes without going through the intermediate boxes. For example contrastive stress has nothing
to do with syntax per se but comes from the mental model directly to the text artifact. Contrastive stress is used to mark out one concept vis-á-vis another. It has nothing to do with word order or affixes
but everything to do with communication and the meaning the speaker is trying to convey. The syntac- tic rules or at least the ones we normally think of do not apply to it. The second is that the inner work-
ings of each box and the transfer between them is also not specified. The model can also work in the reverse fashion. That is, a text artifact can be decoded by passing through syntax, lexical specification
and produce a mental model. In the current diagram, only the production direction is in focus. Finally, the model does not have a specified way for feedback from the audience. These are acknowledged
limitations of the model in its simplified form, but ones that could be corrected.
Given this model it is expected that all languages will map using the same stages. It is not to say that all languages will code everything with the same number of coding points, or that the coding points
will have exactly the same range. In the specific case of reference it is too much to expect that all lan- guages will have exactly the same conventionalized referential forms, but there should be some strik-
ing similarities. If, as I claim, choice of referential form is a signaling device that signals more than just a search strategy, then the evidence is not found in the regularities of data, but rather in the irregulari-
ties. Given the proper data, a case can be made that using different referential forms signals different intents of a speaker. The speaker can choose certain forms to affect not only the activation of the par-
ticipant that is specified by the form but also to affect the activation levels of all the other participants.
This theory makes three predictions. It predicts that besides finding highly topical continuous par- ticipants being referenced by devices high on the topic continuity scale given in table 3.1, we should
also find these same devices being used to introduce participants that are extremely low in topicality and have little or no persistence. This apparent inconsistency is the logical outgrowth of looking at the
devices not as the result of activation but as the means of activation. Just as it makes sense not to acti- vate the most highly activated participant more than needed, it also makes the same sense not to acti-
vate a “prop” in a story more than is absolutely necessary. The use of more than a minimal referential form would also suppress the activation of other participants when it is not needed. The second predic-
tion is that some forms will be selected based on the planned persistence of the topic. Finally, forms
60 The Rationale for Different Referential Forms
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It would be possible to have a second cycle in syntax to handle any purely syntactic rule governed replacements of nominals by pronominals when the two forms are coreferential. I do not believe that it is necessary that it occur at this stage rather than
at the previous one. By saying that the previous stage is semantic, it does not imply that there are not rules functioning at that stage.
will reflect the level of current activation. This will result in differences involving various discourse boundaries as well as referential distance.
3.6 Summary
