Читать книгу Special Indefinites in Sentence and Discourse - Sofiana Lindemann - Страница 15

For Givón (1983), the amount of importance allocated by speakers to different referents is decisive for determining their topicality. He assumes that all referents are more or less topical from the perspective of production and that (i) thematically more important (topical) referents tend to be picked up more often in the discourse, and that (ii) the more recurrent a referent is, the less descriptive material is needed to pick it up. In other words, less explicit types of referring expressions will be used for recurrent or frequently mentioned referents. Bearing these two assumptions in mind, Givón (1983) proposes two measures of importance or topicality, which is not measured directly, but by referential continuity in two opposite directions, namely in the preceding and in the upcoming discourse.

The first measure method or indicator of topicality is anaphoric continuity or referential distance, which investigates a referent’s discourse history by exploring whether the referent has an antecedent, and if so, in which sentence in the preceding discourse it occurs. The smaller the distance between antecedent and anaphor, the more topical the referent is. This backward-looking measure corresponds directly to Ariel’s (1988, 1990) textual factor “distance”, which is also concerned with the distance between anaphor and antecedent in terms of number of intervening sentences between two mentions of a referent. The second indicator of topicality proposed by Givón (1983) is cataphoric continuity, which measures the persistence of a (topical) referent in the subsequent discourse. The prediction is that the more often a referent is picked up in the subsequent discourse, the more topical it is, thus reflecting the speaker’s intentions about the role that entity will play in the continuing discourse. The advantage of Givón’s (1983) model of topic continuity is that it combines forward-looking and backward-looking methods to measure the topicality of a referent in a given discourse. This model can be applied to explore the accessibility of referents introduced by different types of referring expressions, including indefinite noun phrases, which generally lack an antecedent and thus have no anaphoric force. Givón (1983) furthermore observes that potential interference, which refers to the copresence of more referents, which are similar in animacy or semantic and syntactic prominence, may dampen the topicality of a given referent. The prediction is that when many competing referents are present in a text, a pronoun referring back to one of them is (generally) dispreferred, to avoid ambiguity.

In a cross-linguistic analysis of texts, Givón (1983) crossed the two factors determining or indicating the topicality of referents (i.e. referential distance and topic persistence) with different syntactic, semantic and phonologic coding devices to determine topical constituents. The results of his findings are presented in form of a gradable scale, as illustrated in (8).

(8)	Topic accessibility scale (Givón 1983)
	Zero anaphora > Unstressed/ bound pronoun or grammatical agreement > Stressed/ independent pronoun > R-dislocated DEF-NP > Neutral-ordered DEF-NP > L-dislocated DEF-NP > SECTION-movement NP (‘contrastive topicalization’) > Cleft/ focus construction> Referential indefinite NP

The orientative scale in (8) shows, in the same way as the Accessibility Hierarchy (Ariel 1988), that an entity realized as a zero anaphor, or as an unstressed pronoun is an accessible topic and is most continuous in both the previous and the subsequent discourse, while the most inaccessible and discontinuous referents are realized by means of referential indefinite noun phrases.

Givón’s topic accessibility scale comprises not only different types of referring expressions, as full noun phrases or pronouns, but other subscales as well, as for example: (i) the scale of phonological size (e.g. stressed pronoun> unstressed pronoun), (ii) the word order scale (e.g. R-dislocation> L-dislocation), (iii) the scale of syntactic roles (e.g. subject> direct object), (iv) the passive/active scale (e.g. active> passive), (v) the scale of different indefinite grammatical markers (e.g. indefinite this > indefinite a/an in English); the scale of (vi) definite grammatical markers (e.g. the ga- vs. wa distinction in Japanese). By combining different syntactic coding devices, Givón (1983) and his colleagues offer a detailed account for the importance of multiple textual aspects in determining the topical status of referents cross-linguistically. The next Section is dedicated to the discussion of Centering Theory, a framework that integrated the two measures of topicality proposed by Givón in a formal model of reference processing.