On Lexical Cohesive Behavior of Heads of Definite Descriptions: A Case Study

This paper uses materials from annotation studies of lexica l cohesion (Beigman Klebanov and Shamir, 2005) and of definite referenc e (Poesio and Vieira, 1998; Vieira, 1998) to discuss the complementary na ture of the two processes. Juxtaposing the two kinds of annotation provides a u nique perspective for observing the workings of the reader’s common-sense knowle dge at two levels of text organization: in patterns of lexis and in realization o f discourse entities.