Description

According to Fox 1987, the first mention of a referent in a sequence of contexts is performed with a full noun phrase. After that, by using an anaphor the speaker displays an understanding that sequence has not been closed down. We assert that two different sequences generate most of the anaphors to be found in dialogues: the adjacency pair and the topic scope. The former generates references to any local noun phrase, and the latter generates references to the main topic of the dialogue.

Based on this, we propose that the anaphoric accessibility space for any given anaphor may be defined as the set of noun phrases taken from:

• the adjacency pair containing the anaphor, plus
• the adjacency pair preceding the adjacency pair containing the anaphor, plus
• any adjacency pair including the adjacency pair containing the anaphor, plus
• the noun phrase representing the main topic of the dialogue.