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Structural factors, as for example the syntactic function of a referent, have been shown to impact the accessibility of a referent. According to various studies, referents realized as the grammatical subject are more likely to be subsequently pronominalized and picked up compared to direct object or oblique arguments (Givón 1983, Brennan et al. 1987, Gundel 1988, Crawley et al. 1990, Gordon et al. 1993, Lambrecht 1994, Arnold 1998, Walker et al. 1998, Ariel 2001). An initial sentence like the one in example (14a) is more likely to be continued with sentences (14b) and (14d), in which the initial subject is pronominalized. Note that many speakers consider the continuation in (14c) ungrammatical, if the pronoun refers back to the direct object and not the subject referent.

(14)	(a)	Alex1 called Tom2 to share the great news.
	(b)	He1 told Tom2 (that he has to take a deep breath first).
	(c)	? He2 told Alex1 (that he has to take a deep breath first).
	(d)	Tom2 told him1 (that he has to take a deep breath first).

Supporting evidence for a subject preference in pronoun interpretation is provided by psycholinguistic literature as well. Clark and Card (1969) showed that in a sentence memory task, grammatical subjects are recalled with more accuracy than referents realized in other syntactic positions. Givón (1983) showed that subjects are referentially more persistent in the subsequent discourse than non-subjects and Crawley et al. (1990) reported that participants took longer to read sentences with object referents compared to sentences with subject referents. Other syntactic constructions that have been shown to impact referring choice are the topic position in languages like Japanese (Walker et al. 1998, among others) and the focus of clefts (Arnold 1998, Almor 1999, Kaiser 2010).

The preferred referent for a pronoun has been furthermore shown to correspond to the referent in the previous clause, which occupies a parallel syntactic position. Thus, the interpretation of an anaphoric pronoun is facilitated if its coreferential antecedent is found in the same syntactic position in the previous clause (Sheldon 1974, Prince 1992, Gordon et al. 1993, Smyth 1994, Arnold 1998, Ariel 2001, Kehler 2002, among others). For example, the subject of sentence (14a), Alex, is mentioned in the continuation sentence (14b) in the same grammatical position (i.e. subject), thus a pronoun referent is chosen to refer back to it. Taking up the direct object referent Tom in sentence (14a) with a pronoun in subject position, as in (14c) is less natural and unexpected, as the two mentions do not occur in grammatical parallel positions.

Research in the field (MacWhinney 1977, Gernsbacher and Shroyer 1989, Gordon et al. 1993, McDonald and MacWhinney 1995) has argued that it is not only the (parallel) subject position, which influences the accessibility of referents in terms of likelihood of subsequent mention, but that the linear order of mention matters as well. According to this view, the first mentioned referent in a sentence occupies a privileged slot within the sentence, independently of its grammatical function. In many languages, among others in English, German and Romanian, the first-mentioned referent is most often realized in grammatical subject position. Despite this correlation, research has shown that in cases in which these two positions can be kept apart, both factors influence reference resolution (Kaiser and Trueswell 2008). Consequently, first mentioned referents tend to be picked up by less explicit types of referring expressions compared to other referents.