Cognitive Status and the Form of Indirect Anaphors

This paper reports on a study of pronominal and demonstrative indirect anaphors in English naturally occurring discourse. We show that only a small percentage of such forms meet the conditions for appropriate use encoded in the Givenness Hierarchy of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993), and argue that they should be treated as minor violations which the hearer has to repair. Such an account is supported in part by the the relative infrequency of the forms in question compared to other types of indirect anaphors, and by the fact that they occur primarily in unplanned, casual discourse.

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