CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS

General Editors:

J. BRESNAN, B. COMRIE, W. DRESSLER,

R. LASS, D . LIGHTFOOT, J. LYONS, P . H . MATTHEWS,

R. POSNER, S. ROMAINE, N . V . SMITH, N . VINCENT

Discourse structure and anaphora

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In this series

35 MARTIN ATKINSON Explanations in the study ofchild language

development
36 SUZANNE FLEISCHMAN The future in thought and language
37 JENNYCHESHIRE Variation in an English dialect
38 WILLIAM A. FOLEY and ROBERT VAN VALIN JR

Functional syntax and

Universal Grammar
39 MICHAEL A. COVINGTON Syntactic theory in the High Middle Ages
40 KENNETH J. SAFIR

Syntactic chains

41
42
43
44
45

j . MILLER Semantics and syntax

H. c. BUNT Mass terms and model-theoretic semantics
HEINZ J. GIEGERICH Metrical phonology and phonological structure
JOHN HAIMAN Natural syntax
BARBARA M . HORVATH Variation in Australian English: the sociolects of
Sydney
46 GRANT GOODALL Parallel structures in syntax: coordination, causatives,
and restructuring
47 JOHN M. ANDERSON and COLIN J . EWEN

Principles of dependency

phonology
48 BARBARA A. FOX Discourse structure and anaphora
49 LAUREL J. BRINTON The development of English aspectual systems
50 DONNA JO NAPOLI

Predication theory

51 NOEL BURTON-ROBERTS
proposition

The limits to debate: a revised theory of semantic

52 MICHAEL s. ROCHEMONT and PETER w. CULICOVER

53
54
55
56

57 ALESSANDRA GIORGI and GIUSEPPE LONGOBARDI

58
59
60
61

English focus

constructions and the theory of grammar

PHILIP CARR Linguistic realities: an automatist metatheory for the
generative enterprise
EVE E. SWEETSER From etymology to pragmatics: metaphorical and
cultural aspects of semantic structure
REGIN A BLASS Relevance relations in discourse: a study with special
reference to Sissala
ANDREW CHESTERMAN On definiteness: a study with special reference to
English and Finnish
The syntax of Noun

Phrases: configuration, parameters and empty categories

MONIK CHARETTE Conditions on phonological government
M. H. KLAIMAN Grammatical voice
SARAH M. B. FAGAN The syntax and semantics of middle constructions: a
study with special reference to German
ANJUM P. SALEEMI Universal Grammar and language learnability

62 STEPHEN R. ANDERSON

A-Morphous Morphology

Supplementary volumes
RUDOLPH p. BOTHA Form and meaning in word formation: a study of
Afrikaans reduplication
AYHAN AKSU-KOC The acquisition of aspect and modality: the case ofpast
reference in Turkish
MJCHEAL 6 SIADHAIL Modern Irish: grammatical structure and dialectal
variation
ANNICK DE HOU WER The acquisition of two languages from birth: a case study

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DISCOURSE STRUCTURE
AND ANAPHORA
Written and conversational English

BARBARA A. FOX
University of Colorado, Boulder

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS

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CAMBRIDGE u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,

So Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by
Cambridge University Press, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521439909
Cambridge University Press 1994
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1987
First paperback edition 1993
Reprinted 1995
A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Fox, Barbara A.
Discourse structure and anaphora.
(Cambridge studies in linguistics; 48)
Bibliography.
Includes index.
1. English language Anaphora.
2. English language Discourse analysis.
3. English language Spoken English.
I. Title.
II. Series.
PE1398.A52F6 1987 420'. 141 86-33349
ISBN 978-0-521-33082-4 Hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-43990-9 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel
timetables, and other factual information given in this work is correct at
the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee
the accuracy of such information thereafter.

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Contents

Preface

vii

1 Introduction
1.1 Major themes of the study
1.2 Organization

1
1
4

2
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4

Conversational analysis
Notation conventions
The turn-taking system
The structural organization of conversation
Conclusion

6
6
10
12
14

3
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7

Anaphora in conversational English

Introduction
The data
The basic pattern of anaphora
Anaphora in the environment of different-gender referents
Anaphora in the environment of same-gender referents
Non-structural factors in anaphora
Summary

16
16
17
18
45
48
62
75

4 Rhetorical structure analysis

4.1 Rhetorical structure concepts
4.2 Validity in the analysis
4.3 Summary
5 Anaphora in expository written English texts
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Anaphora in some expository written English texts
5.3 Rhetorical structure breaks in anaphora
5.4 Anaphora in the environment of different-gender referents
5.5 Anaphora in the environment of same-gender referents
5.6 Non-structural factors
5.7 Summary

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77
78
91
92
93
93
94
111
118
123
132
135

vi
6
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7

Contents
Anaphora in expository written and conversational English
Introduction
Theories of the differences between spoken and written language
The basic patterns
Demarcating structural units
Different-gender referents and anaphora
Same-gender referents and anaphora
Non-structural factors in anaphora

7 Conclusions
7.1 Localness
7.2 Discourse structures
7.3 Conclusion

137
137
137
139
143
144
147
148
152
152
154
155

Notes
References

156
164

Author index
Subject index

169
171

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Preface

It is almost always a mistake to put a single author's name on a piece of

research. This is especially true for the present study, since so many people
have had more than a passing influence on the ideas and methods used. Most
of the real work of this project was done while I was studying with Bill
Mann, Manny Schegloff, and Sandy Thompson, who, in spite of their
different approaches, all encouraged me, and helped create what is here
now. Without their constant support, this study would never have been
possible.
Sandy Chung, Jack Du Bois, Talmy Givon, Paul Hopper, and Paul
Schachter have all contributed, sometimes unknowingly, to my general
philosophy of language and to my appreciation of other languages. Their
influence pervades the text in a somewhat less visible way, but it is still
there.
My latest thinking about discourse and grammar has been shaped by
colleagues at the University of Colorado, most notably Walter Kintsch and
Paul Smolensky. They have increased my appreciation for what cognitive
psychology and computer science have to offer linguistics, and have been
instrumental in making Colorado an exciting place to be.
Many friends, colleagues, and family members have provided support for
the efforts realized here. To my parents I owe the greatest debt, for always
being understanding about everything. Loralee MacPike provided support
and encouragement for many years, and still does, at a distance. Alan Bell,
Milton Clark, Susanna Cumming, Sarah Gilbert, JoAnn Silverstein, Gina
Schwartz, and Fay Wouk have at various times lent me ears to bend and
shoulders to cry on. A special warm thanks to Anne Hockmeyer.
I am grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a graduate
fellowship which enabled me to concentrate completely on the research for
this project, and to the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, for providing release time for the final writing.
The material presented here as rhetorical structure analysis is derived by

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viii

Preface

my own musings from rhetorical structure theory as developed by Mann,

Matthiessen, and Thompson (1982). Those authors are in no way
responsible for the use I have made of their theory, or for the way in which I
have presented it.
Many thanks to all.
BARBARA A. FOX

Boulder, Colorado

The royalties from the paperback edition of this book will be donated to
Punana Leo o Honolulu, a Hawaiian language immersion preschool for
the children of O'ahu.

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1 Introduction

1.1 Major themes of the study

The last ten years have seen a tremendous upsurge in work on discourse
production and comprehension, correlated with a growing concern in a
variety of disciplines with language as it is used in context. Because of its
fundamental place in the understanding of memory, discourse structure
and semantic interpretation, anaphora has been the focus of much of this
research (e.g. Grosz 1977; Reichman 1981; Sidner 1983; Tyler and
Marslen-Wilson 1982; Webber 1983; Givon 1983; Halliday and Hasan
1976; Bosch 1983; Linde 1979; Reinhart 1983). Central to this work has
been the belief that there is a strong relationship between the flow of
information in a text, the structure of the text, and use of anaphora. A
recurrent, and intuitively appealing, finding of this work is that referents
which are "in focus" or "in the hearer's consciousness" can be pronominalized, where focus or consciousness are operationalized in terms of the
discourse structure (see in particular Grosz 1977 and Reichman 1981).
The present study holds to this interpretation of the relationship between
discourse structure and anaphora. One of the themes that runs through this
study is that any treatment of anaphora must seek its understanding in the
hierarchical structure of the text-type being used as a source of data. Texts
may be produced and heard/read in a linear fashion, but they are designed
and understood hierarchically, and this fact has dramatic consequences for
the linguistic coding employed.
But, while sharing this common background with earlier works, this
study departs from them in several critical ways. Because of the (natural)
emphasis in cognitive science on information processing, work in the area of
discourse structure has tended to view discourse as organized purely in
terms of information flow and propositional content. This view is limited in
two ways: it ignores the critical role played in all text-types by social,
interactional, and affective factors (Linde 1979, van Dijk and Kintsch 1983,

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Introduction

and Duranti 1984 are important exceptions); and relatedly, it fails to take
into consideration the fact that texts are organized as they are not just
because of informational limitations (what Dillon (1981) calls channel
limitations) but also because of socially accepted conventions (cf. Wittgenstein 1958 on language games). As Dillon (1981: 15) has said:
The general point is that if we abstract 'conveying propositional content' as the
common property of written discourses, we have woefully impoverished the notion
of discourse as a human communicative act. Or, to put it another way, we have
created an enormously artificial model of discourse and have obliterated from our
view the elaborate sets of conventions governing particular discourse types and the
ways these can be employed to signal diverse and complex intentions.
The present study, in attempting to provide a complete account of the
distribution of a subset of anaphora - reference to third-person singular
humans in conversation and expository prose, brings out the social as well
as informational aspects of the relationship between discourse and
anaphora. We will see that interactional and affective factors, as well as
genre-specific conventions, do indeed play a significant role in anaphoric
patterning in conversation and writing.
I have limited the scope of this study to third-person singular human
references. I have narrowed the domain in this way to look at anaphora in its
prototypical use: tracking a participant through a discourse (Du Bois 1980;
what Prince (1981) would consider textually evoked references). Other uses
of anaphora, such as the this in example (1) and they in example (2) below,
introduce further complexities: for example, they may refer to previous
utterances, rather than to participants - example (1) - or they may not refer
at all (in the sense of being non-referential: Du Bois 1980) - example (2).
(1)
(2)

Americans love apple pie. This is something to wonder at.

This street has gotten very noisy recently. I think they're putting up a
new apartment building.

These functions of various anaphoric devices are interesting and deserve

further study, but they represent complexities beyond the function of
repeated references to an entity over time, and I have thus chosen not to
include them in the present study.1
Since I am interested here in the relationships between higher-level
discourse considerations and anaphora, the patterns of anaphora I have
examined represent what some have called "discourse anaphora" (related to
what Bosch (1983) has called referential pronouns), in that the instances
analyzed here are not controlled syntactically (see Reinhart 1983 for a

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Major themes

thorough discussion of syntactically controlled anaphora; Bolinger 1977

takes up similar phenomena from a functional perspective). Thus, I did not
examine anaphora of the sort illustrated in the following sentences:
(3)
(4)

Zelda adores her teachers.

Rosa* complained that shex had a headache. (Reinhart, 1983)

The analyses presented in this study include the patterning of pronouns

and full noun phrases in the environment of other referents (both
same-gender and different-gender). I have included these patterns because
such cases provide crucial information towards understanding how people
manage potentially complex and "ambiguous" referring situations. In fact,
to some extent it is possible to understand what counts as cognitively
complex or ambiguous only by exploring such patterns. 2 I also felt that it
was important to determine exactly what kind of referent (in addition to
what kind of structural environment) counted as problematic, hence the
division of referents into same and different gender.
The data for this study consist of (1) naturally occurring face-to-face and
telephone conversations, and (2) small newspaper and magazine articles
and segments of a psychoanalytic biography. Because of the theoretical
orientation adopted here, which states that anaphora correlates at least in
part with hierarchical discourse structure, it was necessary to "parse" these
texts into their component units, so that an understanding of the
relationships between anaphoric patterning and discourse structure could
be achieved. For this task, I chose two different analytic tools, one for each
of the two modalities: conversational analysis, developed to structurally
analyze spontaneous conversation (Sacks et al. 1974); and rhetorical
structure analysis, designed for planned expository prose (Mann et al.
1982; Matthiessen and Thompson forthcoming).
The use of two fairly distinct models for the two types of texts is based on
the belief that the modes are fundamentally different in the units that serve
to organize them. Written monologue texts are by definition produced by
one person, and the units of a descriptive model should reflect this basic
one-party-ness; conversational texts, on the other hand, are by definition
produced by more than one person, and the units of a text model should also
reflect this fact. In addition, written monologue texts are largely
information-oriented, and the structural units of an appropriate model
should capture the types of informational relationships that can hold
between pieces of text, since these relationships give the texts their
hierarchical structure (Decker 1974; Graesser and Goodman 1985);

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Introduction

conversational texts, on the other hand, are largely interactional, and the
units of an appropriate model should capture the social action relationships
that hold between pieces of talk, inasmuch as it is these more-than-oneparty actions which structure the talk (see Rubin 1980 for a discussion of
these and other differences between written and "spoken" language). Thus,
while there are clearly interactional and affective aspects of written
monologue texts and informational aspects of conversational texts, these are
not the fundamental structuring units for that mode. It has therefore been
critical in this work to use one model which focuses on the informational
relationships between propositions for the written monologue texts and
another which focuses on the interactional relationships between utterances
for the conversational texts. From the small set of candidates for each type I
selected conversational analysis and rhetorical structure analysis. Inasmuch
as these approaches are likely to be unfamiliar to most readers, they will each
be described in detail in their own chapters.

1.2 Organization
The remainder of the study is organized as follows: Chapter 2 gives an
introduction to the method of structural analysis used for the conversational
data, conversational analysis. The basic units of the model are discussed,
and example passages are analyzed. This chapter is background for Chapter
3, which details the actual anaphoric patterns found in the conversational
texts. Chapter 3 formulates the anaphoric patterns found in the conversational material. It lays out the patterns of anaphora in the conversational
material in terms of the hierarchic organization of the texts. Structural
patterns, as well as non-structural ones (i.e those performing other
functions), are explored. Chapter 4 gives an introduction to the method of
structural analysis used for the monologue expository written texts,
rhetorical structure analysis. The basic units of the model are discussed,
and example passages are analyzed. This chapter provides the background
needed for the analyses offered in Chapter 5. Chapter 5 formulates the
patterns of anaphora found in the expository written texts, using rhetorical
structure analysis as the tool for exploring the structural designs of the texts.
The patterns of anaphora offered in this chapter, as in previous chapters,
are presented in terms of the hierarchic organization of the texts in which
they occur. Chapter 6 compares the anaphoric patterning established for the
conversational and expository texts using quantitative and qualitative
methods of comparison. Evidence is presented which demonstrates that the

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Organization

two text-types differ fairly strikingly in the distribution of anaphors they

display. Chapter 7 offers thoughts on the theoretical issues of localness of
patterning and the nature of discourse structure.

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2 Conversational analysis
This chapter is meant as an overview of the fundamental concepts of
conversational analysis which will be put to work in Chapter 3. It is by no
means a complete guide to this approach; I have included only those notions
which will be applied in the analyses in Chapter 3. For a more complete
introduction to CA, see Levinson 1983 or Atkinson and Drew 1979.
Readers already familiar with CA can skip to Chapter 3. 1

2.1 Notation conventions

Before we examine some of the substantive findings of conversational
analysis, I would like to present and discuss some of the notational
conventions used in CA-style transcripts. Many of these conventions may
be unfamiliar to linguists, but they are all in fact fairly straightforward.
(The sources of the transcripts reproduced in this book are given in
abbreviated form - AD: 14, SN-4:30, etc. - at the end of the extracts.
Further details of these sources are given in section 3.2.)
All talk is transcribed in a pseudo-phonetic system, using the basic
orthographic symbols of written English; that is, if the speaker pronounces
a word in a way that is not the only possible pronunciation for that word,
then special care is taken to transcribe that particular pronunciation (but
without using a special alphabet). This practice makes the transcripts
somewhat difficult to read (especially for the non-native speaker), but since
it brings out useful information I have not normalized the transcripts
(except for crucial pronouns, which have been normalized for ease of
reading and exposition).
The double slash (//) indicates the place at which a speaker's utterance is
overlapped by talk from another speaker.
M. No. They're a//H thin.]
C. They're not]
(AD: 14)
Thus with this notation we can see that C's utterance starts after the a in M's

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Notation conventions

all. The right-hand bracket (]) indicates the place in the utterance at which
the overlap ends (so C's overlap lasts until after M's thin).
An utterance which has more than one double slash in it is overlapped at
more than one place, and the utterances which do the overlapping are given
in sequential order after the overlapped utterance.
G. they're all Keegans like the ones around Greensprings
they're all kind'v, // bout five five, five si//x,
M. They're all from around Greensprin//gs.
C. Yeh
(AD: 14)
Here, M's utterance overlaps G's starting at bout, and C's utterance overlaps
G's starting with the x in six. Notice that C's utterance also overlaps the very
end of M's.
A left-hand bracket at the beginning of two lines indicates that the two
utterances begin simultaneously.
M. Yeh.
[
C. Lo:ng time ago it reminds me
(AD: 14)
The equals sign ( = ) indicates latching, that is, the next speaker begins
without the usual "beat" of silence after the current speaker finishes talking.
In this case there is an equals sign at the end of the? current speaker's
utterance and another equals sign at the beginning of the next speaker's
utterance. If two speakers simultaneously latch onto a preceding utterance
(that is, they begin talking simultaneously), this is indicated in the
transcript with a left-hand bracket preceded by an equals sign.
(R) (h)hh (h)uh (h)uh (h)uh! =
(S) hhh(h) H(h)m]
=[
K. Which la:]mpost?
(SN-4:30)
Here S and K simultaneously latch onto R's laughter.
Numbers given in parentheses indicate elapsed silence, measured in
tenths of seconds. Single parentheses with a raised dot between them
represent a silence that is less than a tenth of a second but still longer than
the usual beat of silence. These figures are not arrived at with a stop-watch,
but are calculated with a verbal counting technique which takes into account

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Conversational analysts

the tempo of the preceding talk. Thus a silence which is timed at 0.3 of a
second in one stretch of talk might well be timed at something else in
another stretch of talk if the tempo of the preceding talk is different. The
numbers thus indicate "experiential time" rather than chronological time.
Certain facts about the production of the talk are given through the
orthographic symbols used. Punctuation is used to suggest intonation;
underlining indicates stress. A colon after a letter means that the sound
represented by that letter is somewhat lengthened; a series of colons means
that the sound is increasingly lengthened. Anything preceded by a degree
mark is quiet.
The letter h within parentheses indicates "explosive aspiration," and
usually means some type of laughter is being produced. A series of hs
preceded by a raised dot represents an inbreath (where number of hs is
meant to correspond to the length of inbreath), while the same series
preceded by nothing represents exhaling. Capitalization is used to indicate
increased volume.
Questionable transcriptions are enclosed within single parentheses; the
transcribers thereby indicate that the exact form of the utterance is not
clear. Speaker's initials given in single parentheses means that there is some
question about the speaker's identity. Double parentheses - e.g. ((clears
throat)) - represent non-transcribed material (i.e., noise which is
non-linguistic).
These are the major transcription conventions which will be used in the
data fragments in this and later chapters. For a more detailed guide to CA
notational conventions, see Sacks et al. 1974.2
To help the reader identify the structure of some of the passages, I have
created a simple system of labeling which indicates which adjacency pair an
utterance belongs to, what level of structure it is to be heard at, and whether
it is a first-pair part, a second-pair part, or a third-position utterance. This
simple system works in the following way.
The label has three slots: the first indicates the position in the adjacency
pair - first-pair part, etc. - that the utterance fills (first-pair part is
abbreviated^), second-pair part spp). So, for example, the following
invented example has two utterances, the first labeled^)/), the second spp.
A. Do you have a computer at home?
B. No.

[fpp]
[spp]

The second slot in the label reflects a sequential numbering of the

adjacency pairs. The first adjacency in a cited passage is given the number 1,

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Notation conventions

the second adjacency pair the number 2, and so on. The numbering is done
strictly by temporal ordering. All parts of a single adjacency pair (i.e. the
first-pair part and the second-pair part, along with any third-position
utterance) are given the same number. In the following example, we have
two adjacency pairs:
B.

hh Hey do you see v- (0.3) fat oV Vivian

anymouh?
A. No, hardly, en if we do:, y'know, I just say
hello quick'n hh y'know, jus' pass each othuh
in th//e hail.
B. Is she still hangin aroun (with) Bo.nny?

[fpp (1)]
[spp (1)]
[fpp (2)]
(TG:14)

Notice that the fpp and the spp of the first pair are both assigned the number
1, while the fpp of the next pair is assigned the number 2.
The third slot of the label indicates the level of structure at which the
utterance fits in (members of a single adjacency pair are treated as being at
the same level of structure). For example, if we have an announcement pair
followed by a post-elaboration questionanswer pair, the announcement
pair will be labeled as being at a higher level of structure than the
post-elaboration (lower-case letters are used for this slot, beginning with a).
This labeling is meant to capture the impression that the announcement in
such a situation is somehow nuclear, or core, and the post-elaboration is
somehow embedded, or subordinate, or adjunct. An example of this
labeling follows:
M. A:nd ( ) as far as that goes my father's on his
honeymoon. =
= (y:ah ha haha)
K. (Oh::.) Very nice=
K. =Where'd he go.

[fpp (l,a)]
[spp (l,a)]
[fpp (2,b)]
(SN-4:10)

M's utterance is a first-pair part (fpp), and is in the first adjacency pair of the
fragment (1). In addition, it is at the highest level of structure of the
fragment (a). K's first utterance possesses all of the same features, except
that it is a second-pair part (spp). K's second utterance, on the other hand,
is different: it is the beginning of the second adjacency pair, and it is at an
"embedded" level of structure with regard to the first pair (indicated by the
letter b).
This notation system is meant to provide a "map" for some of the

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10 Conversational analysis
fragments presented in Chapter 3. It has no theoretical status, and is offered
only as a simple schematic guide for the reader.

2.2 The turn-taking system

One of the most critical aspects of conversational structure is turn-taking.
How are turns allocated in informal conversation? To answer this question
we need to establish some rudimentary facts about turns.
We need to first establish that there are units out of which turns can be
constructed. These units have been referred to as turn-constructional units
(TCUs), and can be single lexical items (yes, for example), phrases,
clauses, or sentences. According to the turn-taking system, each speaker is
at first allotted one of these TCUs. The end of such a unit constitutes a place
where speaker-change could occur: that is, at this point another person
could begin talking. The end of a TCU is thus a transition-relevance place
(TRP), since it is a place at which a transition from one speaker to another
can (but need not) occur.
The following turn-taking rules, which are based on these concepts, are
taken verbatim from Levinson (1983, which is based on Sacks et al. 1974):
Rule 1 - applies initially at the first TRP of any turn:
(a) If the current speaker selects a next speaker in current turn, then current
speaker must stop speaking, and that next speaker must speak next, transition
occurring at the first TRP after next-speaker selection.
(b) If current speaker does not select next speaker, then any (other) party may
self-select, first speaker gaining rights to the next turn.
(c) If current speaker does not select next speaker, and no other party self-selects
under option (b), then current speaker may (but need not) continue.
Rule 2 applies at all subsequent TRPs:
When rule 1 (c) has been applied by the current speaker, then at the next TRP
rules 1 (a)-(c) apply, and recursively at the next TRP, until speaker change is
effected.
These rules provide a foundation for making sense out of two related
phenomena: simultaneous talk and silence.
Simultaneous talk obviously occurs when two (or more) speakers talk at
once. But not all simultaneous talk represents a violation of the turn-taking
system rules. Rather, there are two basic types of simultaneous talk (i.e.
overlap): competitive overlap and non-competitive overlap. In one type of
non-competitive overlap, called terminal overlap, the current speaker
approaches the end of a turn-constructional unit and, as that is happening,

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The turn-taking system

11

the next speaker, having predicted the type of TCU that the current speaker
is producing, starts talking, thus overlapping with the very end of the TCU
which the current speaker was heard to be constructing. This type of
overlap is not heard as competitive. In addition, laughter from one party
simultaneous with talk from another party is often not heard as competitive
(but appreciative). An example of terminal (non-competitive) overlap is
given below.
N. Also he sid that (0.3) t what you ea:t, (0.2) end how you
wash yer face has nothing tih do with it,
(0.8)
H. Yer kiddin//g.
N. nNo;,
(HG:II:4-5)
In competitive overlap, on the other hand, the rules of the turn-taking
system are violated, usually by the next speaker starting up before the
projected transition relevance place of the current speaker's TCU. An
example of competitive overlap follows.
H. En I nearly wen'chhrazy cz III: I:lo:ve that mo:vie.
N. y:Yeah I know you lojve tha::t.
In this passage H is not near the end of a TCU (she has just produced the
subject of a subordinate clause) when N starts up.
Competitively overlapping utterances can be characterized by higher
pitch, slower tempo, louder volume, and lengthened vowels.
Silence occurs, obviously, when no one is talking. Not all silences are
equivalent, however. Silence is considered a pause if it is attributable, by
the turn-taking system, to a given party; for example, if current speaker has
selected next speaker, then any silence after current speaker reaches the end
of his/her TCU is a pause attributable to the selected next speaker. The
following is an example of two pauses, both attributable to speaker B
(example taken from Levinson 1983, which I follow in this definition of
gaps and pauses, the latter of which Levinson calls "attributable silences"):
A. Is there something bothering you or not?
(1.0)
A. Yes or no
(1.5)
A. Eh?
B. No.

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12

Conversational analysis

Silence is considered a gap, on the other hand, if it is not attributable, by

the turn-taking system, to any particular party. This situation often arises if
the current speaker has not selected a next speaker, and the silence therefore
"belongs" to no one (although the current speaker can apply rule l(c) and
get another turn at talk, and in certain cases this will create the effect that the
preceding silence was in fact attributable to the current speaker). An
example of a gap is given below.
N.
H.
N.

= hhJ1 Dz he av his own apa:rt//mint?

hhhh Yea:h,=
=Oh:

N.

How ididju git his number

(10)
(HG:II:25)

The turn-taking system proposed by Sacks et al. (1974) affords insight

into many other aspects of conversation, but for our purposes here the
concepts covered above will suffice.

2.3 The structural organization of conversation

The next facet of conversational analysis which will be crucial for the
analyses presented in Chapter 3 is the identification of the structural
organization of conversation, through the basic unit of the adjacency pair.
An adjacency pair is said to consist of two parts, the first of which (the
first-pair part) makes relevant a particular type of action (the second-pair
part) from another party. In fact, it is not altogether clear that there should
only be two parts in a "pair", nor is it clear that the parts need to be adjacent.
These problems with the literal interpretation of the term "adjacency pair"
need not concern us here.
We thus have first actions which make relevant second actions by another
party. Standard examples of the notion of adjacency pair are questionanswer, invitation-acceptance, offer-acceptance, request-comply, and
announcement-assessment.
An adjacency pair, or sequence, can take three types of expansions:
pre-expansions, insert expansions, and post-expansions (see Levinson 1983
for a discussion). A pre-expansion is an adjacency pair that comes before
another adjacency pair and is preliminary to it. A classic example of a
pre-expansion is the pre-announcement adjacency pair, which usually
consists of a pre-announcement first-pair part and a clearance second-pair
part:

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Structural organization of conversation

A.
B.
A.
B.

13

Guess what?
What?
I got an IBM PC!
That's great!
(Invented example)

An insert expansion is an adjacency pair which comes between the

first-pair part and the second-pair part of another adjacency pair.
Question-answer pairs are common insert expansions:
A.
B.
A.
B.

May I speak to President Reagan?

May I ask who's calling?
Nancy.
Ok.
(Invented example)

Notice that the insert expansion pair is completed before the other pair
continues.
A post-expansion is a pair which follows another pair. If, for example, an
adjacency pair that seeks to repair some source of trouble in a preceding turn
(known as a repair sequence) is initiated after the possible completion of an
adjacency pair, the repair sequence will be considered a post-expansion:
A.
B.
A.
B.

Do you like Virginia?

Yeah.
You do?
Well, not really.
(Invented example)

It is worth taking a brief excursion at this point into the nature of repair
sequences. A repair sequence is often initiated with what is called a
"next-turn repair initiator" (NTRI), which indicates that in the next turn
the next speaker ought to attend to some problem which the current speaker
has encountered with the preceding turn; hence it initiates repair action for
the next turn. A next-turn repair initiator does not, however, only indicate
technical difficulties with hearing, etc.: it often indicates that the speaker of
the NTRI is about to disagree with the preceding turn (as in the invented
example above). A frequent response to this pre-disagreement in the surface
guise of an NTRI is a backdown, in which the next speaker backs down
from the utterance which triggered the disagreement (as in the example
above).
For the purposes of this study, I have identified two other pair relations
and one turn relation: member of a series, post-elaboration, and turn
expansion. These relations should be taken as tentative; they have not been

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14

Conversational analysis

subjected to the rigorous testing against large numbers of corpora which

characterizes the relations described above.
In a series, one adjacency pair is "tied" to another pair by virtue of being
another in a member of the same series, that is, by being a "next" in a series
of similar items. We can find a series of topic proffers, or a series of requests,
etc. An example of the series relation is given below.
B.

hh Hey do yjou see v- (0.3) fat ol' Vivian

anymouh?
A. No, hardly, en if we do:, y'know, I just say
hello quick'n hh y'know, jus' pass each othuh
in th//e hall.
B. Is she still hangin aroun (with) Bo:nny?
(TG:14)

B's second turn in this passage is a second in a series of topic proffers.

In a post-elaboration, one pair gives a piece of news, or makes a report,
and a subsequent pair gives or seeks details about that piece of news or
report. An example of this relation follows.
M. A:nd ( ) as far as that goes my father's on his
honeymoon. =
= (y:ah ha haha)
K. (Oh::.) Very nice =
K. =Where'd he go.
(SN-4:10)
K's second line is a post-elaboration on the preceding adjacency pair, since it
seeks details about the general piece of news given in M's utterance.
In a turn expansion, a single turn - which had come to a possible
completion place - is continued by the speaker self-selecting (following rule
l(c) of the turn-taking system). An example of this relation follows.
G. I usetuh go over there wih my cousin (over that track),
(1.2)
G. His name wz uh, Tucker.
(AD: 17)
G's second line in this passage is a turn expansion.

2.4 Conclusion
These are the major conventions and concepts that will enter our discussion
of anaphora in conversation in Chapter 3. Additional material about this

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Conclusion

15

method of analysis can be found in Levinson 1983; Atkinson and Drew

1979; Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Goodwin 1981; Terasaki 1976; Pomerantz
1975; Schegloff et al. 1977; and Schenkein 1978. Material about a related
method of analysis can be found in Burton 1980 and Coulthard and
Montgomery 1981.

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3 Anaphora in conversational
English

3.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I discuss the distribution of pronouns and full noun phrases
in non-story conversational texts.
In presenting the distributions, I operate in two modes of description,
one of which can be thought of as the "context-determines-use" mode, the
other the "use-accomplishes-context" mode. In the context-determines-use
mode, it is assumed that the hierarchic structure of the talk determines to
some large extent the anaphoric form which the speaker is to use. The type
of pattern offered in this mode says that in context X the speaker will use
anaphoric form Y. In the use-accomplishes-context mode, on the other
hand, it is assumed that it is by virtue of using a particular anaphoric form
that the structure is created.
I have assumed in this study that both modes of operation are always
present for the participants. That is, for the most part knowledge about how
anaphora is usually handled in certain contexts leads a participant to pick
the anaphoric form that is "unmarked" for the context, and by picking this
form the participant displays his/her understanding of what type of context
is currently under development: this display of understanding, in turn, can
create for the other parties present the same understanding (when by
themselves they might have constructed some other sort of understanding
of the current structure). There is thus a continuous interaction, even in the
simplest cases, of the following three steps of reasoning:
1 Anaphoric form X is the "unmarked" form for a context like the one the
participant is in now.
2 By using anaphoric form X, then, the participant displays a belief that the
context is of a particular sort.
3 If the participant displays a belief that the context is of a particular sort, then the
other parties may change their beliefs about the nature of the context to be in
accord with the belief displayed.

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The data

17

In this way, an anaphoric choice at once is determined by and itself

determines the structure of the talk. It should thus be kept in mind that
while some statements of distribution sound as though they belong in one
mode rather than another, all of the patterns are meant to accommodate the
interaction of both modes.
One further note about the assumptions of this chapter is in order here. I
have assumed that the basic pattern of anaphora (presented below) and the
patterns for different-gender and same-gender environments represent the
unmarked uses of anaphora, in which the speaker can be heard to be doing
"nothing special" except displaying an understanding of the current
structure of the talk. The patterns described under the heading of
non-structural factors, on the other hand, are offered as the "marked" uses
of anaphora, with which the speaker is heard to be doing something special
interactionally (such as disagreeing). In this view, anaphora is not
determined just by referent-tracking, structuring considerations; it is also
manipulated to accomplish certain interactional tasks.
3.2

The data

The conversational data examined in this study cover a fairly broad range.
Telephone and face-to-face, two parties and several parties, single gender
and mixed gender, video-tape and audio-tape, are all represented in the
pool. The conversations were chosen randomly within a set of fixed criteria:
they had to be spontaneous, naturally occurring conversations (rather than
produced in an experimental or induced setting) between friends or
relatives, and they had to contain at least one segment in which at least one
person was referred to more than once. They also had to be transcribed
within the tradition of conversational analysis (see Sacks et al. 1974 and
Chapter 2 of this study for a discussion of transcription practices within this
framework). In addition, the passages had to be non-narrative in nature (see
the discussion below on the comparability of discourse-types, in which I
suggest that expository written texts are in some sense comparable to
non-narrative conversational passages), where narratives are considered to
be relatings of a series of sequenced events. The names of each transcript,
and a brief description of the interactants involved, are given below (very
little ethnographic information is available for these interactions).1
1 TG. A telephone interaction between two college-aged women friends.
Audio-tape.
2 SN-4. A face-to-face, multi-party interaction, involving three college-aged

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18 Anaphora in conversational English

3
4
5
6
7
8

women and one college-aged man (with a brief appearance of another same-aged
woman), all of whom appear to know the others. Audio-tape.
AD. A face-to-face, multi-party (outdoors) interaction involving three couples, most of which consists of the three men talking about cars and car
races. Video-tape.
Friedell. A face-to-face interaction between a college-aged man and woman
(possibly husband and wife). Audio-tape.
HG:II. A telephone interaction betwen two young women friends. Audiotape.
MTRAC:60-l:2. A telephone interaction between a man and a woman
(formerly married to one another, now separated or divorced). Audio-tape.
US. A face-to-face, multi-party interaction involving as many as seven people
(six men and one woman), in an upholstery shop owned by one of the
participants. Audio-tape.
Clacia. A face-to-face interaction between two women friends. Video-tape.

These eight transcripts form the pool of conversational data used in the
study.
3.3

The basic pattern of anaphora

The basic, most unconstrained description of the distribution of anaphoric

devices in non-story talk can be given as follows:
The first mention of a referent in a sequence is done with a full NP. After that, by
using a pronoun the speaker displays an understanding that the preceding sequence
has not been closed down.
This formulation of the distribution implies that interactants monitor the
talk they are engaged in for signs of closure, and reflect to their interlocutors
the result of this monitoring, at least in part, by the type of anaphoric device
they choose.
Notice, too, that this pattern is framed in terms of discourse units, rather
than distance or importance. This formulation runs counter to the
traditional theory of anaphora (for example Givon 1983), which holds that
the anaphoric device chosen by a speaker/writer is correlated with distance
to the last mention of the relevant referent. We will see throughout this
chapter, however, that the traditional theory of anaphora fails to account for
a critical portion of the data.2
The basic pattern contains three subcomponents, each of which will be
examined in detail below. They are:
1 The first mention of a referent in a sequence is done with a full NP.
2 After the first mention of a referent, a pronoun is used to display an
understanding of the sequence as not yet closed.

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The basic pattern of anaphora

19

3 A full NP is used to display an understanding of the preceding sequence

containing other mentions of the same referent as closed.
Each of these subpatterns is taken up in the following sections.
3.3.1

Full noun phrase for first mention

The fairly obvious intuition that the first mention of a referent in a sequence
is done with a full NP is supported by the following data fragments.
B. Eh-yih have anybuddy: thet uh:?
(1.2)
B. -I would know from the English depar'mint there?
A. Mm-mh. Teh! I don't think so.
B. Oh,=
*-B. =Did they geh ridda Kuhleznik yet hhh
A. No in fact I know somebuddy who has her now.
(TG:6)
The first mention of Kuhleznik in the conversation is done with a full NP.
S. She wasn't invited d'the] wedding?
[
M. (I'm g'nuh take her out.)]
(1.0)
M. (She d//oesn' wanna g]o.)
S. (Hardly.])
M. ( )
M. N//o no.]
(R). hhih] hmh-hmh
(0.1)
M. Sh's tryin t'stay away from the wedding "(idea).
(1.0)

M. A:nd ( ) (as) far as that goes my father's on his

honeymoon. =
(SN-4:10)
Here again the first mention of a person, M's father, is done with a full NP.
One additional instance follows:
M.
T.
M.
T.
-M.

Helloj?
Hi: Marsha?
Ye:ah.
How are you.
Fh:ne. Did Joey get home vet?
(MDE:MTRAC:60-l:2:l)

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20 Anaphora in conversational English

In this passage the first reference in the phone conversation to M and T's son
is done with a full NP.
Although, as we will see in a later section the first mention of a referent
can be done with a pronoun, the basic pattern is to have this mention done
with a full NP.
3.3.2

Pronouns used to display that a sequence is not closed

The range of structural contexts in which speakers are likely to display a

"non-closed" understanding is fairly broad; these contexts are described
below.3
The first and most obvious instance in which a sequence is not closed is in
the middle of an adjacency pair, that is, after the first-pair part of an
adjacency pair. Speakers thus regularly use a pronoun in the second-pair
part of an adjacency pair if the referent is mentioned in the first-pair part.
Examples of this extremely common phenomenon are given below.
Ques tionAnswer:
H.

* S.

A.
-B.

Dz Petersin have a copy'v the paper.th't you c'd

read.
(1.2)
Evidently Wa:rd's not letting him, (0.6) talk about what
he wannid t'talk about,
(Friedell:16)
Oh my mother wannduh know how's yer grandmother.
hhh Uh::, (0.3) I don'know I guess she's aw-she's
awright
(TG:3-4)

B. =Did they geh ridda Kuhleznik yet hhh

A. No in fact I know somebuddy who has her now.

(TG:6)
M.
* K.

So (yer da.ting) Keith?

(1.0)
(He's a friend.)
(SN-4:29)

In each of these cases, a pronoun is used in the second-pair part of an

adjacency pair when the referent is mentioned in the first-pair part of the
pair. By using a pronoun in this situation, speakers display their
understanding that the same sequence is in progress.

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The basic pattern of anaphora

21

Another situation in which a sequence is not yet closed is the turn

expansion (Schegloff, class lecture). In a turn expansion, a single turn which had come to a possible completion place - is continued by the speaker
self-selecting (following rule 1 (c) of the turn-taking system). Here again we
have the pattern of possible completion followed by continuation, where the
continuation is effected by a pronoun. Examples of this pattern follow.4
G. I usetuh go over there wih my cousin (over that track),
(1.2)
* G. His name wz uh, Tucker.
(AD: 17)
Here a pronoun (his_ name) is used for the continuing turn expansion.
Another example follows.
G. I usetuh go over there the://n 'n, jio:w, Rich Hawkins
from Bellview drives one, fer some guys frm up't Bellview.
M. ((clears throat))
(0.4)
M. Yah.
* G. He's my:: liddle sister's brother'n law.
(0.5)
-G. He's a policem'n in Bellview
(AD: 18)
In each of the turn expansions in this passage a pronoun is used.
Further examples:
V. When he gave me the ten my wife wz standin right deyuh 'n,
what'm I gonna tell ( ).
(1.3)
V. She wantstuh get intuh my business.
(US:15)
M. and then I've got s'mething planned on Sunday with Laura,
(0.4)
* M. She she wa- she 'n I 're gonna go out en get drunk at four
o'clock in the afternoon
(SN-4:9)

The second-pair part of an adjacency pair does not necessarily signal the
end of a sequence, however. A second adjacency pair can be "tied" to the
first in such a way that the sequence is heard as being continued rather than
closed. Pronouns, as one show of continuing something already started, are
used in these cases. A clear example of this use of pronouns can be seen in

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22

Anaphora in conversational English

the following passage, in which an announcement first-pair part is followed

by its assessment second-pair part, which is in turn followed by the first-pair
part of a new adjacency pair: and this last utterance contains a pronoun
which refers to the person mentioned in the preceding pair.
M. A:nd ( ) as far as that goes my father's on his
honeymoon. =
= (y:ah ha haha)
K. (Oh::.) Very//nice=
K. = Where'd he go.

[fpp (l,a)]
[spp (l,a)J
[fpp (2,b)]
(SN-4:10)

The pronoun is used in this case because the adjacency pair is possibly
complete after its second-pair part has been produced, but it is not definitely
closed. The pronoun in the second adjacency pair displays to the recipient
that the speaker heard the unit as possibly complete but has extended it.
The ways in which an adjacency pair can be "tied" (Sacks 1971) to a
preceding pair seem to be fairly limited.5 The first type of tying is called a
series. In a series, one adjacency pair is meant to be of the same type as some
preceding pair, that is, the next in a series of similar items. The series could
be of any action-type; in other words, we can find instances of a series of
topic proffers, or of solutions to a problem, or of relevant questions about
something. It is clear that, if an item is possibly a member of series, then its
appearance should not close the adjacency pair to which it is tied (when the
last in the series is complete, the tied-to pair is possibly complete); hence a
pronoun can be used in a next member of a series. In the following passages,
for example, pronouns are used in the second member of a series (their
referents appear in the first member). 6
Examples illustrating the use of pronoun in the second member in a series
are given below.
B.

hh Hey do you see v- (0.3) fat ol' Vivian

anymouh?
A. No, hardly, en if we do:, y'know, I jus' say hello
quick'n,
hh y'know, jus' pass each othuh in the hall.
+* B. Is she still hangin aroun (with) Bo:nny?

[fpp (l,a)]
[spp (l.a)]
[fpp (2,a)]
(TG:14)

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The basic pattern of anaphora

M. So (yer darting) Keith?
(1.0)
K. (He's a' friend.)
(0.5)
M. What about that girl he use tuh go with fer
so long

23

[fpp d.a)]
[spp (l,a)]

[fpp (2,a)J
(SN-4:29)

In each of these cases, the first-pair part of the initial adjacency pair is a topic
proffer which is met in the second-pair part with a response. The first-pair
part of the second adjacency pair is a second topic proffer, which represents
a second attempt to get the matter talked about. In this way the second
first-pair part is another in a series started by the preceding first-pair part.
A second way in which an adjacency pair can be tied to a preceding pair is
by a relation I will call post-elaboration. In this relation, one pair gives a
piece of news, or makes a report, and a subsequent pair gives or seeks
(depending on who does the post-elaboration) details about that piece of
news or report (compare this relation with the elaboration relation in
rhetorical structure analysis). Once again, the initial pair can possibly be
complete when its second-pair part is produced, but a post-elaboration
continues it, and this continuing of a not definitely closed unit is displayed
by the use of a pronoun.
M. Arnd ( ) as far as that goes my father's on his
jipneymoon. =
= (y:ah ha haha)
K.
K.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

(Oh::.) Very//nice =
= Where'd he go.

B.
A.
B.
A.
B.
A.

[fpp (1 ,a)]
[spp (l,a)]
[fpp (2,b)]
(SN-4:10)

Oh Sibbie's sistuh hadda ba:by bo:way.

Who?
Sibbie's sister.
Oh really?
Myeah,
"(That's nice.)

[fpp
[fpp
[spp
[fpp
[spp
[spp

She had it yestihday. Ten:: pournds.

Je:sus Christ.

[fpp (4,b)]
[spp (4,b)]

d,a)]
(2,b)]
(2,b)]
O,b)]
(3,b)J
(l.a)]

7. B .
8. A .

(TG:27)
In this passage, an announcement is made at line 1, and this eventually gets

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24

Anaphora in conversational English

its second-pair part at line 6. The sequence is at line 6, then, possibly

complete, but B continues it at line 7 with a post-elaboration first-pair part,
in which she gives details about the news announced at line 1. The speaker's
understanding that the announcement sequence was only possibly complete
allows her use of a pronoun at line 7, in which she continues the sequence.
Another example of post-elaboration and pronominalization is given below.

H. And there wz a tedder fr'm Da:ve.

(0.4)
S. Dave,
H. My brother Da:ve.
S. Oh. Okay. When you said Dayuv I went. First
Dave I think of is, () Dave Gintrun Dave Chu:n
(0.4)
S. En the(h)en,
(0.3)
H. Then David Wiser 'n // then David Jones ("III know)
S. nhh!
S. Yea:h.
S. Well yer b(0.4)
S. He's not say//leeyent.
H. He i:s Da:ve//yihknow.
S. he- he's not sa(h)l(h)ie(h)nt.
(0.6)
H. ooE:sh.
(0.9)
- S. What'd he haftuh say,
(Friedell:8-9)

In this case, the post-elaboration (the last line) is produced by the recipient
of the announcement, rather than by its speaker. Nonetheless, the
post-elaboration is done with a pronoun, which is an indication from S that
she has heard the announcement sequence as not definitely closed (in spite
of the material intervening and the fact that she hasn't produced a
second-pair part for the announcement). 7
This is an appropriate time to point out that the mention of the referent in
the initial adjacency pair does not have to come in the first-pair part of that
pair; it can come in the second-pair part and still be pronominalized in the
post-elaboration pair. An instance of this phenomenon is given below.

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The basic pattern of anaphora

25

C. (Oh-) how wz the races las'night.

(0.8)
(). (ha-//uh)] =
C. Who w'n //th' feature.]
M. =AI won,]
(0.3)
C. (Who)
[
]=
M. Al.
C. =A1 did?
*-C. Dz he go out there pretty regular?
(AD:7)
In this passage, the relevant referent (Al) appears in the second-pair part of
the initial adjacency pair and yet can still be pronominalized in the first-pair
part of the post-elaboration pair begun by C in the last line. It is far more
common, however, for the mention in the initial pair to come in the
first-pair part. 8
It is also possible, in the case of post-elaboration and the other tying
relation discussed here, that the pronoun in the tying pair will come in the
second-pair part, rather than in the first. That is, it is possible to find cases
in which a referent is mentioned in an adjacency pair and then
pronominalized in the second-pair part of the tying pair. An example of this
situation is given below.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

H.

=hhh Oh yih know w'n I wz talking

tuh Gra:ce.
(0.2)
N. Gra//:ce,
H. Member Graxe? my fren Gra//xe,
N. Ye::ah.=
H. =hhh Ay:::u::n, hhhh she has, these best
frien's.=
N. "=Uh hu:h,
()
H. tha:t live in: Minneapolis, 'n they have a
sp:n.=
N. Oh:.
=[
H. who's twunny:: four'r twunny fi//ve. Sumpn,
N. Uh hu:h,
H. = ptthhhh 'n he's in gra:d school i:n uhhh (.)
bio chem 'r "something like thait,=
N. =Sounds good,=

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26

Anaphora in conversational English

19. H.
20. N.
21. H.
22.
23. H.
24.
25. N.
26. H.
27.
28. N.
29. H.
30. N.
31.(H).
32.
33. N.
34. H.
35.
36. N.
37. H.
38.
39. H.

=A:n'hhhhhh hnh-hnh //sounds kosher? ihhhh =

"(shhounds ghhhood)
A:n' he's coming ou:t.here,
(0.3)
January twunny seventh er // something.
thhh
Mmmm:::::: :::::.
=So: en she awready wrote him about
me en evrythi//ing en she'd lhke
A w r ] _: : g h t.
=(t') f//ix us u:p.
Does he wanna meet you?
(So),
()
I mean d//z he wannaWell he doesn' have too much've a
choi(h)oice=
=Oh yeh that's truhh! =
= i- u- e:hhh,
()
u- uhhhh
[

40. N.
41.
42. N.
*-43. H.

uhnuhhhh
(0.2)
Well wt's () wt's he H://ke.
hhhhhhhh a- ah: she says
(HG:II: 19-21)

Here, we get an announcement (H's lines 26-9) and then a series of two
post-elaborations initiated by N at lines 30 and 42 (does he want to meet you?
and well what's he like). The pronoun referring to Grace in the second
post-elaboration (at line 43) comes not in the first-pair part, but in the
second-pair part. It is clear from this sort of example - in which eleven lines
separate the last mention of Grace from the most recent mention of her that mere distance between mentions by itself is not what determines
anaphoric patterns; rather, it is the structural properties of the talk that
exert this influence.
Two adjacency pairs do not have to be physically contiguous for one to be
tied to, as a "continuation" of, the other; they can be separated by adjacency
pairs bearing one of the relations described above to the initial pair, and to
one another, as long as the second of the pairs in question returns to the first
of the pairs, that is, bears one of the above relations (i.e. series,
post-elaboration, or post-expansion) directly to that pair rather than to one

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The basic pattern of anaphora

27

of the intervening pairs. In essence what I am referring to here is a situation

in which a pair "ties" to a pair other than the immediately preceding one. I
will call this structure a return pop.9 Let me illustrate the concept of return
pop, and the types of anaphoric patterning associated with it, by looking at a
few examples.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

C. He:y. Where c'n I get a::, uh, 'member the old twenny
three Model T spring.
(0.5)
C. Backspring 't came up like that,
C. Dju know what I'm// talk] what I'm talkin a//bout,]
M. Ye:h,]
M. I thi]nk- I know whatchu mean,
C. Wh'r c'n I get o:ne.
(1.2)
G. Just use a regular one.
(0.7)
C. Mmm I'd jike t'get a, high one if I cou:ld.
(0.7)
G. I know uh-]

15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

M.

t
Lemme ask] a guy at work. He's gotta bunch a'
old clu//nkers.
G. Y'know Marlon Liddle?
(0.2)
M. Well I can't say they're ol' clunkers he's
gotta Co:rd?
(0.1)
M. Two Co:rds,

23.

(f.0)

24. M.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
-32.

And

[
C. Not original,
M. Oh yes. Very orii(h)nal
C. Oh::: reall//y?
M. Yah. Ve(h)ry origi(h)nal.
C. Awhhh are you jhittin m//e?
M. No I'm not.
(0.8)
C. What's his name.
(AD:22)

In this example, C produces a request for information at line 8, which M

responds to with an offer (let me ask a guy at work). M then makes use of
this offer to do something of a sly announcement (lines 19-22), in the form

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28 Anaphora in conversational English

of a self-repair. The relevant person is mentioned in this offer/announcement. Announcement sequences often contain within them insert appreciation pairs, and in this passage, C initiates a series of three appreciation
inserts (lines 25-30). Each of the three appreciation pairs is at the same level
of structure as the others, and each is also "tied" to the announcement by the
insert-expansion relation. None of them contains mentions of the person
referred to in M's pseudo-announcement. Nonetheless, after these insert
expansions, C can do a post-elaboration on the announcement, that is, do a
return pop, using a pronoun to refer to the person last mentioned in the
announcement. In this case, we have a nice instance of long-distance
pronominalization sanctioned by the structure of the sequence.10 A
schematic representation of the passage may clarify the return pop
pronominalization:
Question/Request * Answer/Offer/Announcement

Question

^ * - Appreciations
Here, then, as in the cases we have seen so far, the pronoun displays the
speaker's understanding that the pair being returned to is, although possibly
complete, not yet definitely closed. The pronoun helps to produce the
feeling of "continuing" something that is still going on.
As I have formulated the pattern of return pop, it must be the case that
the sequence which the pop returns to has not been closed down prior to the
return pop. If a sequence has been closed down then a subsequent retrieval
of some portion of the talk of that sequence is not a return pop. The exact
structural status that such a move should have is unclear to me: but at any
rate it is not a return pop, as I have defined that notion here.
Another example of a return pop, with pronoun, appears below.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

H. Y'know w't I did las'nh//ght?

N. Wha:t,=
H. =Did a ie:rrible thi:::://ng,
N. You called Si:m,
(0.4)
H. No:,
"()
N. What.
()
H. t hhhh //Well I hedN. You called Richard, =
( ) =hh-hh =

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The basic pattern of anaphora

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
*-24.

29

H. =(h)y(h)Yea(h)h en I h(h)ung up w(h)u he a(h)ns//wer

N. Oh: Hyia why:::://::,
H. hhh =
=W'first'v all I wasn'about t'spen'seventy five cents fer
th(h)r(h)ee(h)mi(h)//nni(h)ts ulveh =
N. Yeah,
N. =That's true,=
H. = hihhh That's a l(h)otta money plus () uh then it's
twunny five cents fer extra m:minute a(h)//fter that.
N. Yea:h,
H. = hhhhh y//ihknow,
N. How do you know he answered
(HG:II:22-3)

This passage also illustrates long-distance pronominalization with a return

pop. In this case, the sequence begins with H making a pre-announcement
(lines 1 and 3), which N at first responds to with a clearance marker (what),
but then guesses at once (you called Sim), gives up (what), then guesses at
again (you called Richard), this time successfully. H's third-position
response to the last guess indicates that it is correct, and goes on to add more
news (line 13). This is the crucial line for the upcoming return pop. At line
14 N produces the first-pair part of a post-elaboration of line 13, and this
gets a fairly lengthy answer from H (lines 16-23, with third position
acceptances from N). At line 24, N returns to line 13 to do the first-pair part
of another post-elaboration; this return contains a pronominal reference to
Richard, the person last mentioned at line 13. The gap of ten lines does not
cause N to use a full NP for the reference, as one would expect in traditional
theories of anaphora, because the item being returned to is not yet closed
(although it is possibly complete before the return). The pronoun at line 24
displays N's hearing of H's line 13 as not yet closed, and serves to help
accomplish a "continuing" of that line.
The connection between returns to earlier adjacency pairs and longdistance pronominalization is not a new finding of this study. It was first
noted in the natural language processing literature (Grosz 1977) that
long-distance pronominalization was possible ij^if and only if) there were
certain structural properties which held concerning the last mention of the
item and the intervening material. Some of the structural properties which
have been said to "induce" such long-distance pronominalization are given
below:
1 In a situation of accomplishing a main goal by accomplishing smaller subgoals
(e.g., as was the case, for example, in Grosz's work, building a pump), a return

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30 Anaphora in conversational English

to the main goal after work on a subgoal could be done with a pronoun. For
example, Grosz found that speakers in her experiments could use it to refer to the
pump as a whole (the object of the main goal) even if it had just been used to refer
to a subpart of the pump. (Guindon 1986 reports similar results.)
2 If a speaker is interrupted, either by him/herself or by someone else, with a
sequence carted by what Schegloff and Sacks (1973) call a misplacement marker
(for example, by the way), then the interrupted sequence can be returned to after
the interruption is hearably complete using a pronoun. Reichman (1981) reports
instances in which such an interruption goes on for 30 minutes and yet the
interrupted sequence is picked up again with a pronoun.
These instances of long-distance pronominalization have been called
"return pops" in the natural language processing literature, because the pronouns in these cases show a return to an ongoing concern after some stretch
of talk in which the discussion is about something else. I have chosen to retain
the term "return pop" for the sake of continuity with this previous work.
In my own work I have found a much wider range of situations in which a
return pop can be done than had been previously identified. In essence, if
there is a context in which there is a focal adjacency pair, with subsequent
pairs tied to it (and to one another) by the adjacency-pair relations described
earlier, then there can be a return pop to the focal pair. That is, the
returning utterance must continue the returned-to sequence; if an utterance
simply mentions a referent from a preceding adjacency pair, that is not
sufficient grounds for calling the utterance a return pop. With the exception
of same-gender environments (see section 3.4.2 for a discussion of return
pops in same-gender environments), the basic pattern is for such return
pops to be done with pronouns.
It should be noted at this point that a return pop is not necessarily a
return to the most recent mention of the referent, as can be seen from the
following passage, in which the return pop is to a mention other than the
most recent:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

A. Oh my mother wannduh know how's yer grandmother.

B. hhh Uhjj, (0.3) I don'know I guess she's aw-she's
awright she went to the uh:: hhospital again tihda:y,
A. Mra-hm?
B. hh t! hh A:n:: I guess t'day wz d'day she's
supposetuh find out if she goes m ner not. =
A. =Oh. Oh::.
B. Becuz they're gonna do the operation on the teeuh duct.
-f//fi:rs]t. Before they c'n do t//he cataracts.
A. Mm-hm,
A. Right.

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The basic pattern of anaphora

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.

A.
B.

31

Yeah.
hhh So I don'know I haven:'t yihknow. she wasn' home
by the t-yihknow when I leffer school tihday.=
= Mm hm.
Teh! hh So uh I don't kno:w.
(0.3)
En: =
= M//hm
Well my ant went with her anyway this time,
Mm hm,

A.
B.
B.
A.
B.
A.
r

22. B.
23. A.
24. B.
25.

I
My mother didn't goMm hm.
t! hhh But uh? I don" know = She probably haf to go
in soo:n though.
(TG:3-4)

The return pop at line 24 is a return not to the last mention of the
grandmother, which occurs at line 20, but to B's first round of answers at
lines 2-6 (with A's continuers included).11 Here again we see that the
traditional theory of anaphora, which takes into account only the most
recent mention of a referent, neglects a wide range of anaphoric patterns.
It is obviously crucial for this type of analysis that interactants, as well as
analysts, be attuned to the differences between tying to the immediately
;prior talk and return pops. That is, it must be the case, if this analysis is to be
at all meaningful, that recipients hear the difference between these two
types of moves and, perhaps more importantly, that speakers produce their
utterances so as to display whether they are of one or the other type. I would
like to argue here that speakers do indeed build their utterances to display
the level of structure at which they fit in: the "unmarked" level is the
immediately preceding sequence; special techniques are used to indicate
that the utterance returns to a superordinate adjacency pair.
The main technique that I have seen used by speakers to achieve the
effect of a return pop is repetition of words used in the returned-to
sequence/action. Examples of this design follow (the repeated words or
phrases are enclosed in #s).
H. Yea(h)h en I h(h)ung up w(h)u he a(h)nswer

N.

How do you know he #answered#

[RETURN]
(HG:II:23)

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32 Anaphora in conversational English

H.

He-He went to: one mixer, et some,

H. End he #went to one et some#

[RETURN]
(Friedell:9-10)

A. Oh my mother wannduh know how's yer grandmother.

B. hhh Uh::, (0.3) I don'know I guess she's aw- she's
awright she went to the uh:: hhospital again tihda:y,
A. Mm-hra?
B. hh t! hh A:n:: I guess t'day wz d'day she's
supposetuh find out if she goes in ner not.

B.

t! hhh But uh? #1 don'know#=She probably haf to #go in#

soo:n though.
[RETURN]

H. And there wz a ledder fr'm Da:ve.

[repair sequence]
S. What'd he haftuh say,

H.

He's:: (y'know) had two days of cla::sses 'n he #says#

he's already behi:nd.
[RETURN]
(Friedell:8-12)

S. Has he said anything about running into uh () Lawsin

or () Da:ve?

H.

He did #run indoo#, (1.2) guy he'd known in the

Philippines.
[RETURN]
(Friedell: 10-11)

In each of these cases, exact lexical repetition is built into the utterance to
indicate at what level it is to be heard. Ties to the immediately preceding
adjacency pair are not as regularly designed to exhibit their ties overtly,
hence my characterization of them as the "unmarked" move.
It should not be inferred from this claim about the design of return pops
that all return pops are built with lexical repetition to display their structural

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The basic pattern of anaphora

33

position; some return pops do lack this feature. That is, it is not the case that
lexical repetitions are required in all instances to "accomplish" a return pop.
Passages in which return pops are accomplished without lexical repetition
are given below.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

C.

He:y. Where e n I get a::, uh, 'member the old twenny

three Model T spring,
(0.5)
C. Backspring 't came up like that.
C. Dju know what I'm// talk] what I'm talkin a//bout,]
M. Ye:h,]
M. I thi]nk- I know whatchu mean,
C. Wh'r c'n I get o:ne.
(1.2)
G. Just use a regular one.
(0.7)
C. Mmm I'd like t'get a, high one if I cou:ld.
(0.7)
G. I know uh-]

15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

M.

25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.

C. Not original,
M. Oh yes. Very origj(h)nal
C. Oh::: reall//j?
M. Yah. Ve(h)ry origi(h)nal.
C. "Awhhh are jou shittin m//e?
M. No I'm not.
(0.8)
C. What's his name.

Lemme ask] a guy at work. He's gotta bunch a'

old clu//nkers.
G. Y'know Marlon Liddle?
(0.2)
M. Well I can't say they're ol' clunkers he's
gotta Co:rd?
(0.1)
M. Two Co:rds,

(f.O)
M.

And

(AD:22)
In this passage, the return at line 32 to the utterance at lines 19-20 does not
repeat any of the lexical items in the returned-to utterance.
1. H.
2.

=hhh Oh yih know w'n I wz talking

tuh Gra:ce.

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34 Anaphora in conversational English

3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

(0.2)
Gra//:ce,
Member Graxe? my fren Gra//xe,
Ye::ah.=
= hhh Ay:::u::n, hhhh she has, these best
frien's.=
N. ~=Uh hu:h,
()
H. tha:t live in: Minneapolis, 'n they have a
so:n.=
N. Oh:.
=[
14. H. who's twunny:: four'r twunny fi//ve. jSumpn,
N.
H.
N.
H.

]=
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.

N.
H.
N.
H.
N.
H.
H.
N.
H.
N.
H.
N.

N.
H.
N.
H.
H.

40. N.
41.
42. N.
43. H.

Uh hujh,
= ptthhhh 'n he's in gra:d school i:n uhhh ()
bio chem 'r "something like thajt, =
=Sounds good,=
=A:n hhhhhh hnh-hnh //sounds kosher? ihhhh =
(shhounds ghhhood)
A:n' he's coming ou:t. here.
(0.3)
January twunny seventh er // something.
thhh
Mmmrnj::::: :::::.
=&): en she awready wrote him about
me en evrythi//ing en she'd lhke
A w r ] _: : g h t.
=(t') f//ix us u:p.
Does he wanna meet ^ou?
(-)
I mean d//z he wannaWell he doesn' have too much've a
choj(h)oice =
=Oh yeh _that's ^ruhh! =
= i- u- e:hhh,
()
u- uhhhh
[
uhnuhhhh
(0.2)
Well wt's () wt's he ]i://ke.
hhhhhhhh a- ah: she says

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The basic pattern of anaphora

35

In this passage, line 42 is a second in a series of post-elaboration questions

from N about H's announcement (at lines 26-9); the first post-elaboration
question from N comes at line 30 {Does he want to meet you?). The two
post-elaboration questions are thus tied to one another by the series relation,
and are both tied to the announcement at line 26-9 by the post-elaboration
relation. By this analysis, line 42 returns to the announcement adjacency
pair, even though it bears a series relation to the first post-elaboration pair
(one could say that the post-elaboration relation is the primary relation in
this case). Note, however, that line 42 does not repeat any of the lexical
items of the announcement (or of the first post-elaboration question, for
that matter).
In both of these cases, return pops are done with pronouns but without
lexical repetition. We will see later that lexical repetition in return pops is
most often utilized in the environment of same-gender referents. I will
postpone discussion of that fact until section 3.4.1. In any event, lexical
repetition is not required in return pops.
Furthermore, the presence of a pronoun after a long gap does not
necessarily indicate that a return pop has been done. This fact is illustrated
by the following passage, in which a pronoun is used after a referential gap
but its utterance is not a return pop:
1. N. Didn'you wanna rilly say hi:,=
2. H. =Ye:s, but ez soon ez he said hello I hung up.=
3. N. Oh: : : : : : : ,
=[
4. H. So I don'know'f ah'll ge'charged the seventy
5.
fi*c(hh)ents(h)'r not,=
6. N. =No I don't think you will but- () (you)
7.
might git charged something,
8.
(0.3)
9. H. |Oh:.=
10. N. =Un]e:- you know w't you shoulda do::ne? =
11. H. =Call'the operator en said I gotta wrong//number,
12. N. u-Y:e:a::h,=
13. H. = hhh
14.
(.)
15. H. Ye::h I din'think of it I wz too upset
-16.
about hearing his vhhoi(h)ce,=
(HG:II:24)
Lines 15-16 contain a pronoun (his_ voice) which refers to a person last
mentioned at line 2, a gap of thirteen lines; yet those lines are not a return to

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36

Anaphora in conversational English

line 2 (or to any other line containing a mention of the relevant person).
Rather, they tie, by the relation of post-expansion, to the immediately
preceding adjacency pair (lines 10-12). I conclude from this example that a
pronoun in and of itself does not "accomplish" a return pop, nor does its
mere presence entail a return pop; while there is a close interaction between
return pop and pronominalization, it is not a causal relation in either
direction. They are independent facts which in some cases become
intertwined.
Having looked at pronominalization in return pops, I would like to
present a remarkable passage in which one of the participants displays her
understanding of a return pop by willfully misinterpreting it as "tying" to
the immediately preceding action (instead of back to an earlier pair) in order
to make a little joke. With this action we see thatfor the participants, and not
just for the analyst, there is a very real difference between an utterance that
goes back to an immediately preceding adjacency pair and a return pop.12
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

B.
A.
B.
A.
B.
A.

7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
*-19.

B.
A.
B.
A.
B.
A.
B.

B.
A.

Oh Sibbie's sistuh hadda ba:by bo:way.

Who?
Sibbie's sister.
Oh really?
Myeah,
"(That's nice.)
[
She had it yestihday. Ten:: poutnds.
Je:sus Christ.
She ha//dda ho:(hh)rse hh hh
(
ba:by.)
hhhuhh! hh (Guess) why-But theh-sh-I-She wz
ovuh-She's lo:ng-She wz long ovuhdue.
Mom.
And she, She had gai:ned about fawty pounds
anyway, hh
They said she was tremendous.
(0.5)
So I'm sure they're happy about that.
Nyeh thet she's treme(h)ndous hhh
(TG:27)

At line 18 B does a return back to Sibbie's sister had a baby boy (line 1) with
her So I'm sure they 're happy about that, where that refers back to the fact of
the sister having had a boy. At line 19, A on the other hand jokingly
"misinterprets" B's utterance as an expansion on They said she was
tremendous (line 16).13 That A's utterance can come off as a little joke is a

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The basic pattern of anaphora

37

strong indication that some structural fact is being manipulated for

humorous effects: the structural fact involved here is a return pop.
There appears to be still another structural situation in which a sequence
is not yet closed and a pronoun is used. In this case, there is an adjacency
pair which is tied-to by the following adjacency pair by one of the relations
discussed above, which is in turn tied-to by the subsequent adjacency pair,
which is in turn tied-to by the next adjacency pair, etc., in a "chaining" sort
of pattern.14 In fact, I will call this structure an adjacency pair chain. It
seems that if there is a mention of a referent in the first adjacency pair of the
chain and then a subsequent mention of that referent in a later pair in the
chain (and no intervening mention of the referent), the subsequent mention
is done with a pronoun. The speaker thereby displays an understanding that
the sequence of the first adjacency pair is not yet closed, and in turn
accomplishes the continuation of the sequence. An example of this pattern
is given below.
1. N. Didn'you wanna rilly say hi:,=
2. H. =Ye:s, but ez soon ez he said hello I hung up. =
3. N. Oh: : : : : : : .
=[
4. H. So I don'know'f ah'll ge'charged the seventy
5.
fi'c(hh)ents(h)'r not, =
6. N. =No I don't think you will but- () (you) might
7.
git charged something,
8.
(0.3)
9. H. {Oh:.=
10. N. =Un]e:- you know w't you shoulda do::ne? =
11. H. =Call'the operator en said I gotta wrong//number,
12. N. u-Y:e:a::h,=
13. H. = hhh
14.

()

-15. H. Ye::h I din'think of it I wz too upset about hearing his

16.
vhhoi(h)ce, =
17. N. -Aw-:::::::,
(HG:II:24)
The structure of this passage can be roughly presented as follows:
pair 1
pair 2
pair 3
pair 4
By using a pronoun in the first-pair part of the fourth adjacency pair, H

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38 Anaphora in conversational English

shows that she is continuing a sequence which is still ongoing, even though
she is not tying directly back to the pair in which the preceding mention of
the referent occurred.
In all of the preceding discussion, I have presented cases in which it is a
fairly straightforward matter, for the participants as well as for the analyst,
that the sequence containing mention of the relevant referent is not yet
closed. The pronoun in these cases is doing the routine work of showing that
"nothing special" is being done. In the examples I will present now, on the
other hand, the pronoun displays an interactional construction (or
construal) of the sequence on the part of one participant which may not have
been the construction of the other participant(s). These cases, in their
different ways, fall into the category of reopening a sequence which might
well have been thought closed by the other participants.
In the first subgroup of this type, material intervening between the
utterance in question and the talk that it "ties" to is, by the use of the
pronoun, shown to be an interruption, even if it was not heard as an
interruption when it was first produced. The pronoun thus creates a
retroactive construction of what might otherwise have been
sequence 1 (closed)

sequence 2

as
sequence 1 (not closed) interruption

seq 1 (continued)

The following passage exemplifies this use of pronominalization:

1. C. How's uh,
2.
(0.7)
3.(G.) ((clears throat))
4. C. Jimmy Linder.
5.

(0.6)

6. C.
7. M.
8.
9. C.
10. M.
11.
12. G.
13.
14.(C.)

He's-he's pm the Usac. (0.1) trail//isn'e?

No. He isn't runnin Usac, he runs, just, (0.2)
mainly uh, asphalt now, h//hh
Oh r/niy?
=He does real well.
(0.7)
D'y' ever go down t'the S'ndusky track down,
the asphalt,
(No, )
[
15. M. I aven'been down there in years'n years.
16.
I don't care much fer
17.
asphalt. I like (
//
// ).

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The basic pattern of anaphora

39

18. C. I'd rather=

19. C = I'd rather watch the dirt track racing yeh, =
20. C. =How come he's r-what's:: is he tryina move up?
(AD: 19-20)
Lines 1-10 in this passage are basically a question-answer pair (with two
tries at the first-pair part, and notice that C's line 9 is overlapped by M's line
10). At line 10, then, the sequence is possibly complete. At line 12 G starts
up another Q-A pair, but his first-pair part is not tied to the preceding pair
by any of the relations discussed above; it is, in fact, a new sequence
(although G's deliberate repeat of the word asphalt in line 12 is no doubt
intended to show that line 12 is in some way related to what went before it),
which closes down the previously only possibly complete sequence. At line
12, then, what we seem to have is:
sequence 1 (closed)

sequence 2

This interpretation of the talk is further reinforced by the uptake by M

and C that G's first-pair part engenders: M and C both answer the question,
thus indicating that they "buy into" the interpretation in which sequence 1 is
closed. But at line 20 an interesting thing happens: C ties back to M's lines
7-8 by means of a post-elaboration relation, doing this with a pronoun. C
thereby demonstrates that he understands sequence 1 to be not yet closed,
which in turn shows that the Sundusky track adjacency pair is now to be
heard as an interruption of a still-ongoing sequence, rather than as a new
sequence following the close of the preceding sequence.
C's use of a pronoun at line 20 thus accomplishes a reinterpretation of the
talk into:15
sequence 1 (not closed)

interruption

sequence 1 (continued)

In the second subgroup of the category of pronouns reopening sequences,

we have the most extreme use of the pronoun in accomplishing an
interactional feat. In this pattern, the sequence containing mentions of the
relevant referent is in the process of being closed (by one of the closing
mechanisms - either of the sequence or of the conversation - available to
parties; see Schegloff and Sacks 1973 for a detailed discussion of these
mechanisms) but is subsequently strikingly reopened when a pronominal
reference to the relevant person occurs. An example of this pattern follows.
1.
2.
3.
4.

A.
B.
A.
B.

Hello
Is Jessie there?
(No) Jessie's over et 'er gramma's fer a couple da:ys.
A'right thankyou,

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40 Anaphora in conversational English

5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

A.
B.
A.
B.
A.
A.
B.

Yer welxome?
Bye,
Dianne?
Yeah,
OH I THOUGHT that w' z you,
Uh-she's over et Gramma Lizie's fer a couple days.
Oh okay,

Notice that B initiates a closing of the conversation at line 4. A appears to

accept the initiation at line 5, and B continues with the final closing at line 6;
at this point we would expect A to produce a version of bye at line 7, after
which both parties could conceivably hang up. As Schegloff and Sacks
(1973: 317) note:
Once properly initiated, a closing section may contain nothing but a terminal
exchange and accomplish a proper closing thereby. Thus, a proper closing can be
accomplished by:
A: O.K.
B: O.K.
A: Bye Bye
B: Bye
For the conversation above to be properly closed, then, we would expect A
to produce a final closing bye. Instead, she overlaps B's closing with an
utterance that clearly calls for the conversation to be reopened (a first-pair
part). B confirms the identification in the second-pair part (line 8). The
conversation is now clearly open for both parties, and at line 10 A creates the
additional reopening of the topical talk of the call (lines 2-3) by referring to
the person mentioned in lines 2-3 with a pronoun. This is a striking instance
of the use-determines-context mode of operating, inasmuch as A clearly
accomplishes a reopening of the relevant sequence by using a pronominal
form.
3.3.3

Full NPs used to display that a sequence is understood as closed

If pronouns are used to display a participant's understanding of a sequence

as not yet closed, then it follows that full NPs are used to display an
understanding of a sequence as closed.
An example of a full NP being used to refer to a person last mentioned in a
closed sequence is given in the following passage. The argument for viewing
the relevant sequence as closed runs as follows: whenever a return pop is
done, the material which is "popped over" is closed off.16 In the following

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The basic pattern of anaphora

41

passage, the touched-off comment at lines 3-4 is closed by a return to the

preceding pre-closing moves at lines 7-8 (M is about to leave the scene of the
interaction). Notice that M's return pop at line 7 is signalled by so anyway, a
common right-hand parenthesis device. When the person introduced in the
now-closed touched-off comment is re-referenced at line 10, the reference is
done with a full NP.
1. M.
2.
3.
4. M.
5.
6.
7. M.
8. M.
9.
10.(M)
*-11. R.
12. S.
13. M.

W'l (anyway listen) I gotta (go), I gotta(-) do

alotta studying
(0.3)
Oh en Hillary said she'd call me if- she was
gonna go t'the library with me
(0.9)
But- (0.1) I don't think she will
So ennyway (0.2) Teh. I'm gonna go have these xeroxed
'n I'll come back inna little bit.
(hhhh/hh)
(Oka//y. Say]) hi t'Hillary for me.
Okay.]
Okay I will.
(SN-4:32)

Thus although the last reference to Hillary is only three lines away from the
most recent mention, it is done with a full NP because of the structure of the
material between these two mentions. Here again, the traditional theory of
anaphora, which uses distance as the main criterion for anaphoric selection,
turns out to neglect the fundamental issues faced by interactants when they
choose among various ways of referring to people.
The following passage also illustrates the claim that return pops close off
the material over which they pop.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

C. He:y. Where c'n I get a::, uh, 'member the old twenny
three Model T spring,
.
(0.5)
C. Backspring 't came up like that,
C. Dju know what I'm// talk] what I'm talkin a//bout,]
M. Ye:h,]
M. I thi]nk- I know whatchu mean,
C. Wh'r c'n I get o:ne.
(1.2)
G. Just use a regular one.
(0.7)
C. Mmm I'd like t'get a, high one if I cou:ld.
(0.7)

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42

Anaphora

in conversational

14. G.

English

I know uh-]
[

15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

M.

Lemme ask] a guy at work. He's gotta bunch a'

old clu//nkers.
G. Y'know Marlon Liddle?
(0.2)
M. Well I can't say they're ol' clunkers he's
gotta Cqird?
(0.1)
M. Two Co:rds,
(1.0)
M. And

25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.

C. Not original,
M. Oh yes. Very origi(h)nal
C. Oh: :: reall//y?
M. Yahi. Ve(h)ry Oigi(h)nal.
C. "Awhhh are ^ou shittin m//e?
M. No I'm not.
(0.8)
C. What's his name.
[two stories intervene]

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

G. Getta piano s//tnng en cut 'er nipples off.]

C. Jesus Chri:st Mi:ke?]
G. hhh hhhh
(0.5)
C. Kesh! hh
G. hhh hhhh!
C. I gue::ss.
(0.7)
G. "That's pitiful.
(10)
G. Nah this Marlon Little's been building, roadsters
in th'str- considered street roadsters he builds.
C. Nh.
G. B'tche aftuh ra:ce 'em o//n the tra:ck]s ( //).]
C. Oh Little.]
C. Little. Ou:t] et uh:m
M. Yah right up, PorV/Clin' Roa:d.
C. on Por'Clin' Road.
C. Ye:h.
M. He usetuh get dow//n there.
G. He works over et the plant.He's (in the plant.)
(0.7)

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The basic pattern of anaphora

43

23. C. Well I see I got my T bucket startih =

24. C. = Well I // didn't get it started I got it- I'm tailkin
25.
about it now I'm, tryina get things lined up for it.
G.
((clears throat))
(1.2)
M. You wanna mo:del, what?
(0.5)
M. Te//e?
C. You know what you know the kinda spring I'm talkin about.
(0.3)
C. Th'muh-the p//ld model t]e//eM. Yah they're] =
M. = They're
C. Yea//h.
M. They're a .hi:gh arch spr//ing.
C. High arch spring.
G. Oh: jist across the back end?
[
C. Any-any high arch.
C. Yeh.
C. Yeh but[
G. Well see (uhmy ex) father'n law down'n Port Clint'n has
one thet's (not) started. He's, got the engine (out)
'n evrything.
(0.5)
G. 'N eez got- a spring thet comes, (0.7) way up, allfrom one wheel t'the other.
C. Yeah, Ys right,
G. Big hi:gh en this is a twu: I think it's a twunny
seven, 'r::
C. We://ll anyways if I cain' get it- I mean I'm just
lookin fer so//methin.If ehy if it//'s substitute, yihknorw, =
G. twenny ei//ght
G. ButG. Uh: hh
C. =If I can' get that I'll just haftuh go, to a lower
spring.// ( )
M. You c'n get'em ma:de.
G. S'm guys in Bellview bui//lt a frame (en it cost] em),
C. Yea:h, fer a fortune,]
(another page of talk)
M.

'F you needed a spring, yo//u wannid a certain type

a' spring you c'go out'n get it made.

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44 Anaphora in conversational English

C. Mm-hm?
* C. I heard Little wz makin um, was makin frames
'n sendin 'm t'California.
(AD :22)
This amazing passage consists essentially of four parts: C's request for
information about a spring for his model T and the talk that engenders; two
stories about men who own cars (one told by M and the other told by C); G's
return to talking about Marlon Little (which picks up his question of line 16
of the first fragment); and C's return to talking about his model T and
spring (at line 23 of the second fragment). C's return at line 23 to his
much-previous talk about his model T pops over the Marlon Little sequence
(which runs from line 11 to line 21 of the second fragment), and according
to the pattern should close off this sequence. Indeed, the next mention of
Little (in C's last utterance in the second fragment) is done with a full NP.17
In the following passage, a full NP is used after a sequence has come to a
possible completion place, and a long lapse (5.0 seconds) has grown. Under
these conditions, it is very likely that the participants will treat the relevant
sequence as closed, since it has come to a possible completion place and all of
the parties have "passed" on the opportunity to continue it. The full NP in
the next passage thus signals the speaker's understanding that the relevant
sequence had been closed.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.

H. Is//n't Peterson giving a, () talk t'day,

S. IhS. Yeah// I'm s'posetuh go to it,
H. (et noon),
(0.6)
H. Et noon,
(0.2)
S. No.
H. O//h. When izzit ( ).
S. It's the three uh'clock seminar.
H. Oh.
(0.2)
S. 'n I have a class frm three tuh four en
that leaves me in the Frieze Building at four
te:n.
(0.7)
S. Trying to run through th'raiyn over tuh,
H. You c'd- (0.2) C'dn you skip French one day?
(0.4)
(S). oo(Yhe:::::h.)
(5.0)

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Different-gender referents

45

-22. H. Dz Petersin have a copy'v the paper.th't

23.
you c'd read.
(Friedell:lS-16)
The sequence is possibly complete at line 20, and the feeling of completion
is further reinforced by the long lapse at line 21. By line 22, then, H has
every reason to expect that the sequence started at line 1 has been closed.
These are the major types of closed sequences followed by full NPs in my
data. There are almost certainly other varieties which await description.

3.4 Anaphora in the environment of different-gender referents

It has often been proposed in the literature (see for example Givon 1983)
that the appearance of a second referent in the discourse can cause the first
referent to be referred to with a full NP. In the next two sections, I examine
the patterns of anaphora associated with environments in which other
referents are introduced. In the present section, I explore the anaphoric
patterning within environments in which referents of different genders are
mentioned.
The basic pattern presented in section 3.2 seems to hold for the
environment of different-gender referents. The statement of this pattern is
repeated here:
The first mention of a referent in a sequence is done with a full NP. After that, by
using a pronoun the speaker displays an understanding that the sequence has not
been closed down.
That is, pronominalization seems to be possible as long as the sequence
containing mention of the appropriate referent is not yet closed; if this
sequence has been closed, presumably a full NP is used.18
3.4.1

Pronominalization in a not-yet-closed sequence

As we saw in section 3.2.2 above, a sequence is most definitely not closed if a

first-pair part has been produced and awaits its second-pair part. We thus
find that if a person is mentioned in the first-pair part of an adjacency pair,
even if there is a different-gender referent also present in that utterance, the
basic pattern is for that person to be pronominalizable in the second-pair
part. Examples of this pattern follow.
N. Y'do wunna see his forty four year o//F?
H. hhhhhhh.=

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46 Anaphora in conversational English

H.
H.

= u:h-uh k
( )
hhhh I c'n live without her,

hhhhhh

In this example we have two referents, one male and one female, in a
first-pair part of an adjacency pair; the female is referred to with a pronoun
in the second-pair part.
Another example follows.
S. Djiju tell her you had svmpathih-svmpathy pai//ns
for him?
( ) (heh)
M. (h(h)h No.) I din' tell her anyth(h)ing. hhh
(SN-4:28)
Here again, we have a male referent and a female referent mentioned in the
first-pair part; the female is pronominalized in the second-pair part.
The only other example of pronominalization in the environment of
different-gender referents I have found is the following passage, in which
(1) the first-pair part of a post-elaboration contains a pronominal reference
to the (male) person mentioned in the tied-to core pair, and (2) the
second-pair part of a return pop adjacency pair contains a pronominal
reference to the (female) person mentioned in the returned-to pair:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

H.

= hhh Oh yih know w'n I wz talking

tuh Graxe.
(0.2)
N. Gra//:ce,
H. Member Grajce? my fren Gra//jce,
N. Ye::ah.=
H. =hhh Ay:::u::n, hhhh she has, these best
frien's.=
N. =Uh hu:h,
( )
H. tha:t live in: Minneapolis, n they have a
so:n.=
N. Oh:.
=[
14. H. who's twunny:: four'r twunny fi//ve. Sumpn,
]=

15. N. Uh hu:h,
16. H. =ptthhhh 'n he's in gra:d school i:n uhhh ()
17.
bio chem 'r "something like tha^t,=
18. N. =Sounds ood,=

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Different-gender referents

47

19. H.
20. N.
21. H.
22.
23. H.
24.
25. N.
26. H.
27.
28. N.
29. H.
30. N.
31.(H).
32.
33. N.
34. H.
35.
36. N.
37. H.
38.
39. H.

=A:n'hhhhhh hnh-hnh //sounds kosher? ihhhh =

"(shhounds ghhhood)
A:n' he's coming ou:t. here,
(0.3)
January twunny seventh er // something.
thhh
Mmmm:::::: :::::.
=So: en she awready wrote him about
me en evrythi//ing en she'd lijke
Awri::ght.
=(f) f//ix us u:p.
Does he wanna meet you!
(So),
()
I mean d//z he wannaWell he doesn' have too much've a
dioi(h)oice=
=Oh yeh that's truhh! =
= i- u- e:hhh,
( )
u- uhhhh
[
40. N. uhnuhhhh
41.
(0.2)
42. N. Well wt's () wt's he ]i://ke.
*-43. H. hhhhhhhh a- ah: she says () he y'know,
44.
th'las'time she saw him which wz () three years
45.
ago he wz pretty good looking
(HG:II: 19-21)
The core pair in this fragment appears at lines 26-9 (an announcement
and an assessment). The preceding lines provide leading-up, background
information for the announcement (note N's anticipation of the announcement possibly by line 13, and certainly by line 15). Notice that two
referents, one male and one female, are mentioned in the announcement of
line 26. Lines 30-6 stand in a post-elaboration relation to the core pair, and,
as we would expect from the basic pattern, a pronoun is used in the first-pair
part of the post-elaboration to refer to one of the people mentioned in the
core pair. The pronoun here displays N's understanding that the sequence
is not yet closed and, in fact, that she is continuing it. At lines 37-40 we have
laughter, which can indicate the end of a sequence. At line 40, then, the
sequence is possibly over. At line 42, however, N continues the sequence
with another post-elaboration (the second in a series with the first one) of
the core pair. Since this post-elaboration returns to an earlier pair (and not

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48 Anaphora in conversational English

to the immediately preceding pair), it is a return pop. In the first-pair part of
this post-elaboration, N uses a pronoun to refer to the male mentioned in the
core pair, again displaying her understanding that, while the sequence may
have been possibly closed at line 40, it was not definitely closed, and she is
continuing it. Then, at line 43 H uses a pronoun to refer to the female
mentioned in the core pair, even though this person was not mentioned in
the first-pair part of the current adjacency pair (and in fact had not been
mentioned for eleven lines). In using this pronoun, H clearly exhibits an
understanding that the sequence in which the core pair belongs is not yet
closed. Of course, we can also say that by using a pronoun in this situation
she creates an understanding for herself and her interlocutor that the
relevant sequence was not closed.
We can conclude from these examples that the appearance of a
different-gender referent does not alter the basic pattern of pronominalization established for the situation in which no "interfering" referents are
mentioned.
I have no examples of full NPs used in the environment of differentgender referents, so no claims can be made about that portion of the pattern.

3.5 Anaphora in the environment of same-gender referents

In this section I examine the patterns of anaphora for the situation in which
referents of the same gender are present. We will see in this discussion, as in
the preceding section, that simple introduction of another referent does not
necessarily produce "ambiguity"; it is the structural organization of the talk
that determines what will count as "interfering" and what not.
The pattern for anaphora in the environment of same-gender referents
seems to be something like the following. As we will see in Chapter 5, and
following Reichman (1981), a discourse unit is in an active state if it is being
tied-to by the current adjacency pair. For example, in the following passage,
the first adjacency pair is active while the second pair is being produced:
1. M. A:nd ( ) as far as that goes my father's on his
2.
honeymoon =
3.
=(y:ah ha haha)
4. K. (Oh::.) Very nice=
5.
Where'd he go.
(SN-4:10)
Even if the two pairs are not physically contiguous, as long as the second ties
(in one of the relations we have described here) to the first - and this could

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Same-gender referents

49

be via a return pop to the first - then the first is in an active state while the
second one is being produced.
Given those descriptions of active, the pattern for anaphora in the
environment of same-gender referents can be stated as:
By using a pronoun when two referents of the same gender are present in the talk, the
speaker displays to the hearer that the referent intended is to be found in an
adjacency pair which is currently in an active state. If there are two referents of the
same gender that are in pairs that could both be considered active (depending on
what it is the speaker is doing), then the speaker will use other devices in addition to
the pronoun (such as repetition of key words) to guide the recipient to the intended
referent; if the speaker chooses (for whatever reason) not to use such devices, then a
full NP will be used for the reference.
This pattern is examined in detail below.
3.5.1

Pronominalization for pairs in an active state

According to the pattern above, we should expect to find pronouns perhaps in conjunction with other linguistic devices - used to perform
references to persons mentioned in "tied-to" pairs, even if there are other
referents of the same gender physically closer to the pronominal mentions.
The major subgroup of this class is return pops to one referent "over" a
referent of the same gender. An illustration of this use of pronominalization
follows.
1. A.
2. B.
3.
4. A.
5. B.
6.
7. A.
8. B.
9.
10. A.
11. A.
12. A.
13. B.
14.
15. A.
16. B.
17.
18. B.
19. A.

Oh my mother wannduh know how's yer grandmother.

hhh Uh::, (0.3) l_ don'know I guess she's aw-she's
awright she went to the uh:: hhospital again tihda:y,
Mm-hm?
hh t! hh A:n:: I guess t'day wz d'day she's
supposetuh find out if she goes in ner not.=
=Oh. Oh::.
Becuz they're gonna do the operation on the teeuh duct.
-f//fi:rs]t. Before they c'n do t//he cataracts.
Mm-hm,
Right.
Yeah,
hhh So I don'know I haven:'t yihknow, she wasn' home
by the t-yihknow when I leffer school tihday.=
=Mm hm,
Teh! hh So uh I don't kno:w,
(0.3)
En: =
=M//hm

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50 Anaphora in conversational English

20. B. Well my ant went with her anyway this time,
21. A. Mm hm,
[
22. B. My mother didn't go.
23. A. Mm hm,
24. B. t! hhh But uh? I don'know=She probably haf to go
25.
in soo:n though.
(TG:3-4)
This passage consists basically of one question that receives three rounds
of answers. The first round starts at line 2 and runs through line 9 (to line 12
if A's continuers are included); the second round begins at line 13 and runs
through line 22 (line 23 if A's continuer is included); and the third round
begins at line 24. The second and third round are tied to one another and to
the first answer as members of a series, and they are all in a sense second-pair
parts to the question of line 1. Notice that each round begins with / don't
know. Now the critical pronoun that I am interested in here occurs at line 24
(she. probably have to go in soon though): this pronoun unambiguously
refers to the grandmother, and yet the nearest female referent in the passage
is B's mother (mentioned at line 22), and in fact at line 20 another female
referent (B's aunt) is mentioned. Why does B use a pronoun in this case, and
how is it that the pronoun is unambiguous?
The answer to the first question is, in my opinion, directly tied to the
answer to the second; that is, I am assuming that speakers use pronouns in
same-gender environments whenever they can assume that the reference
will be unambiguous. In other words, the claim is that speakers use
pronouns whenever they feel they can "get away" with it. How is it, then,
that a pronoun can be unambiguous in a same-gender environment? Quite
simply, because of the structure of the talk, and the way the speakers display
their understandings of this structure to one another.
In the passage at hand, B does two return pops (the second and third
rounds of answers) to her first answer. Notice that each of these later
answers displays its relation to the first answer by repeating exactly a phrase
from the first answer - i.e. / don't know. B thus clearly indicates the
structure of the talk she is producing by using the linguistic device of lexical
repetition to mark which utterance she is tying to. The pop is in this sense
accomplished, at least in part, by the repetition of guiding lexical items.
Now note that the pronoun I am focusing on here occurs in one of these
return pop answers marked by / don't know. My claim about this pronoun is
thus the following: a pronoun can be used in a same-gender environment

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Same-gender referents

51

(assuming for now that the referents are mentioned in different adjacency
pairs) if it is clear which adjacency pair contains the antecedent mention of
the referent - that is, which adjacency pair is being tied-to by the relevant
utterance. The pronoun at line 24 is therefore unambiguous because the
antecedent locus of the utterance at line 24 (and 25) is unambiguous - the
utterance is clearly not tied to the immediately preceding talk but goes back
to the answer started at line 2 (notice that lines 24-5 also repeat the phrase go
in from line 6). And, as the only female referent mentioned in lines 2-12 is
B's grandmother, B thus clearly displays that the grandmother is the
intended referent of the pronoun. The return pop makes the returned-to
item active, and closes the "popped-over" material, and the referential
source of the pronoun lies in the returned-to material. What is critical here is
the speaker's use of a linguistic device other than the anaphor itself to signal
to the recipient the pair to which the utterance is to be tied.
Another similar example of return pop with pronoun in a same-gender
environment appears below.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

N. Also he sid that (0.3) t what you ea:t, (0.2)

end how you wash yer face has nothing tih do with it,
(0.8)
H. Yer jciddin//g.
N. nNo:,
~
(0.4)
N. He says 't's jjll inside you it's 'n emotional
thing'n, hhh e//n,

13.

[intervening challenges, supports of claims, assessments]

14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

N. 'n that made me feel good he-I jguess he sees some

pretty bad ca:ses =
[intervening material]

N. I- c- I rilly b'lieve him cz another doctor tol' me that

|too\
(0.4)
N. A doctor et school tol' me the exac'same thing he said
it's j's something new they're discovering y'know hhh
"s like()
H. Mean I c'n eat all th' candy bars I want//nhhow?hh
N. | Yeah. And, en the fact that you, you feel guijjty
about eating them that's what makes you break oujt b'cuz
it's (0.4) 't's all inside you,=

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52 Anaphora in conversational English

25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
*-37.

H.
N.
H.
N.
N.
H.
N.
H.
N.
N.

= t hhh So people who've broken out ther just

very emotional //peo(h)ple ha^h?
hhhhh hih hhhh En ther worried a//bout it,
in uh eh eh e:h e//h eh
hhh hh =
=1 don'know it sounds kinda crajzy =
= : hh//hhhh
bu:t
=Jista liddle.
()
We::_:ll,
(0.3)
He may me feel bet//ter anywa(h)y

(HG:II:4-6)
Here again we have a case in which the pair that an utterance ties to is
clearly signalled by the speaker, and this signalling makes the use of a pronoun unambiguous. In this passage, one male doctor is discussed, and N
says, of him and what he said, and that made me feel good. Later, at lines
14-18, another male doctor is introduced, as a source of authority to
support what the first doctor said. Between lines 19 and 36 no mention is
made of either doctor, and then at line 37 we find a pronoun referring to the
first doctor. Notice that in line 37 N repeats (although not exactly) the
phrase used in line 1: he made me feel better anyway. The unambiguous pronominalization is thus possible at line 37 because N clearly
signals her return to an earlier utterance (line 1) in which only one male
referent was mentioned (the first doctor). The referent mentioned in lines
1418 does not in any way compete for the anaphor.
This particular passage makes another critical point about the nature of
anaphora in conversation: contrary to popular belief, the referent of a given
pronoun is not necessarily the referent of the last use of that same pronoun.
Recall that in the present example the most recently mentioned male
referent (that is, before line 37) is the other doctor, not the real referent of
the pronoun. It should be clear that we must look to the structure of the talk,
and how interactants display their understandings of the structure, if we are
to account for the anaphoric patterning in conversational discourse.
Another instance of return pop done with pronoun and repeated lexical
items follows.
1. H. And there wz a ledder fr'm Da:ve.
2.

[repair sequence]

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Same-gender referents

53

3. S. What'd he haftuh say,

4.

[3 pages of answers and more questions]

5. S, Has he said anything about running into uh ()

6.
Lawsin or () Dajve?
7.
- 8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
*-22.
23.

[some answers to this question]

H. hhh En he did- run into a guy who wu- went tuh
highschool with me:, who's- (0.6) now a senior at Yale.
(2.0)
S. Highschool with you:.
H. "Mm-hm,
S. Same year 'r,
H. One year behin//d me.
S. Oh:.
(5.0)
S. Hm:.
(0.7)
S. B't nobody we know, (
),
H. No:.
(0.4)
H. He's:: (y'know) had two days of clajsses'n he says
he's already behi:nd.
(Friedell:8-12)

There are two male referents in this passage: Dave, who is first
mentioned at line 1, and "a guy," who is first mentioned at line 8. According
to traditional theories of anaphora, the pronoun at line 22 should thus be
ambiguous, since there are two same-gender referents in close proximity to
the pronoun. But once again we see the power of structural indicators for
"disambiguating" anaphora: the pronoun in line 22 is part of an utterance
which is a member of an answer series to the question posed by S at line 3;
that is, line 22 pops right over the lines in which the other male referent is
mentioned and picks out, by repeating the key word say, the item to which it
is tied. The lexical repetition helps to accomplish a return pop to a specific
point in the preceding talk, and this return pop allows the use of a pronoun
to be unambiguous.
One last instance of this pattern is given below.
l.C.
2.

I heard Little wz makin urn, was makin frames'n

sendin 'm t'California.

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54 Anaphora in conversational English

3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
*-14.
15.
16.
*~\1.
18.
19.

[2 pages of intervening talk]

G.
C.
G.
C.
G.
C.
G.
C.
C.
C.

That's all- he don't have any ki:ds, him en his wife

never had any kids'n,
((clears throat))
(Whatta) they go:t y'know ( )
(0.5)
W'l,=
=1 guess(0.7)
T!//Nah he helped,]
He's got] he's got eight jinits thet he rents ourt 'n,
He helped uh, Merkie build Jiis T bucket up. I saw
Merkie's is un is a, darn nice lookin little bucket.
(1.0)
En then I, ez I lieard det- ^ou know he built a couple
of'm up'n he usetuh build frames fer gu:ys =
'n then he, uh:: seh-uh sent a couple of'm t' California.
(AD:32-4)

Using repetition of the words heard, frames, send to California, C signals a

return at lines 17-19 to the pair started at line 1, thereby "popping over"
mentions of a same-gender referent, Merkie. The pronoun in line 17 is
unambiguous, for the reason that C has clearly signalled the pair to which
the utterance is tied, and that pair includes mention of only one referent Little.
This pattern of repeating lexical items in a return pop in a same-gender
environment is a striking feature of the way interactants organize their talk
for their interlocutors. The crucial data are given below for emphasis (the
relevant lexical items are enclosed in # s ) :
A. Oh my mother wannduh know how's yer grandmother.
B. hhh Uh::, (0.3) #1 don'know# I guess she's aw-she's awright
she went to the uh:: hhospital again tihda:y,
A. Mm-hm?
B. hh t! hh A:n:: I guess t'day wz d'day she's
supposetuh find out if she #goes in# ner not.
B. t! hhh But uh? #1 don'know# = She probably haf to #go in#
soo:n though.
(TG:3-4)

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Same-gender referents
H.

55

And there wz a ledder fr'm Da:ve.

[repair sequence]

S.

Whafd he haftuh #say#,

[3 pages of answers and more questions]

H.

He's:: (y'know) had two days of cla:sses'n he #says# he's

already behhnd.
(Friedell:8-12)

S.

Has he said anything about ^running into* uh ()

Lawsin or () Da:ve?

H.

He did #run indoo#, (1.2) guy he'd know in the

Philippines.

H.

hhh En he did-#run into# a guy who wu-went to highschool

with me:,
(Friedell:10-ll)

N.

'n that #made me feel good# he-I guess he sees some

pretty bad ca:ses

N.

We:::ll,
(0.3)
He #may me feel better# anywa(h)y

N.

(HG:II:4-6)
C.

I #heard# Little wz makin urn, was makin #frames# 'n

#sendin 'm t'California#.

C.

En then I, ez I #heard# det- you know he built a couple of

'm up'n he usetuh build #frames# fer gu:ys =
'n then he, uh:: seh-uh #sent a couple ofm t' California*.
(AD:32-4)

C.

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56 Anaphora in conversational English

It is thus clear that speakers build their utterances to indicate the pair they
are tied to; and the main technique used in this design is lexical repetition of
the words used in the returned-to talk.
Another, less obvious technique that seems to be used in this design is the
slight "hitch" that occurs in the returning utterance, that is, a small
self-repair, a sound-stretch, an utterance internal pause, or a phrase such as
But uh or um or you know. Such hitches are common in return pops, and
could in a sense be a design feature of those moves; they need not be
repetitions of hitches in the original utterance. Examples of this phenomenon are given below.19
B. t! hhh But uh? I don'know=She
C. En then I, ez I heard det-you know he built
H. He's:: (y'know) had two days of cla:sses
H. He did run indoo, (1.2) guy he'd known
H.

hhh En he did- run into a guy who wu- went to highschool

N. We:::ll, (0.3) he may me feel better anywa(h)y

It is an intriguing possibility in same-gender environments that the
hearer, upon hearing a pronoun, for example he in He's you know had two
days of classes, does not immediately find the referent, since the speaker
could in fact have produced further talk on the immediately preceding
adjacency pair; rather, it could be the case that the recipient suspends
resolution of the pronoun until the locus of "tying" of the entire utterance is
clear (see Tyler and Marslen-Wilson 1982 for similar conclusions). This
possibility is completely in keeping with the treatment of anaphora I am
developing here; since it is the structural relation of the utterance to the
preceding talk that determines patterns of anaphora, and not surface-given
facts like topic continuity or referent ambiguity, the resolution of an
anaphoric device must depend on the recipient's understanding of the
particular structural pattern currently being developed. If the recipient
cannot make a determination about the structural pattern at the time that
the anaphoric device is used, then s/he may suspend resolution, or may
make a tentative guess at the referent, until enough of the utterance has been
produced to indicate the structural relation.

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Same-gender referents

57

A second subgroup of the class of cases in which pronouns are used to

refer to items in an active adjacency pair occurs when two referents of the
same gender are mentioned in the same adjacency pair, or even in the same
pair part. In this case, lexical repetition indicating the tied-to pair for an
utterance is not sufficient, since the referents appear in the same pair. Here,
lexical repetition combines with grammatical role continuity and lexical/
semantic plausibility to create an utterance in which reference is
unambiguous.
Consider, for example, the following passage, in which two same-gender
referents are mentioned in one utterance, and in which, in a turn expansion
of that utterance, pronouns are used to refer to them.
1. H. Dz Peterson have a copy'v the _paper.th't you c'd read.
2.
(1.2)
3. S. Evidently Wa:rd's not jetting him, (0.6) talk
4.
about what he wannid t'talk about,
5.
(0.5)
*-6. S. M-he's making him talk about sumhing else th(h)et
7.
evrybody's hea:rd.
S's turn at lines 3-4 contains references to Ward and to Peterson, and both
are pronominalized in her turn expansion at lines 6-7. The pronouns are
unambiguous in this case because of the semantic and grammatical
structure of the utterance. That is, Ward has been established as the causer
in a causative clause (line 3) while Peterson has been the causee.
Furthermore, Peterson has been established as the agent of an event of
talking. In lines 6-7 these semantic/grammatical roles are maintained:
someone is causing someone else to be the agent of talking. Since the roles
are explicitly maintained by the use of parallel phrases and structures
(letting him talk about vs. making him talk about), the pronouns are
unambiguous, inasmuch as they can be heard as referring to the entity that
filled their slot in the preceding utterance. Here, as before, we see that
pronominalization is possible in same-gender environments if other
linguistic devices are utilized to guide the interpretation.
These data have significant implications for informationally based
schemes that do not take structure into account. Prince's taxonomy for
given and new information (Prince 1981), for example, would not be able to
distinguish the pronominalizability of the referents in these cases, since in
the instances above the referents would all be textually evoked. These data
suggest, then, that further refinements of the given-new contrast (or of any
other information-oriented terms) are in order to capture the complexity of
this kind of anaphoric patterning.

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58 Anaphora in conversational English

3.5.2

Full NPs used when other linguistic devices are not used

It was claimed above that pronominalization is possible in the environment

of same-gender referents if other linguistic devices besides the anaphor itself
are used to guide the recipient to the intended referent. In cases where other
devices are either not available or for some reason not used, full NPs will be
used.
Below I present an instance in which a return pop over same-gender
referents is done with a full NP, in contrast with the examples of return pops
we saw in the preceding section. A full NP is used in this case, it is argued,
because the returning utterance is not built (for whatever reason) to indicate
what exactly is being returned to. The full NP makes the reference clear,
given that there is no help from the structure of its utterance.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

C. Keegan usetuh race uhr uh- er ih was um, (0.4)

usetuh run um,
(2.7)
C. Oh:: shit.
(0.4)
C. Uhm,
(0.4)
C. Fisher's car.
M. Three en//na guarter?
C. Thr//ee enna guarter.
M. Yeh,
(1.0)
C. (When I) wz foolin around.
G. I usetuh go over there wih my cousin, "(when he
had a car),
(1.2)
G. His name wz uh, Tucker.
G. (They had a-) McGill from,(Knotsville)
G. Sam's from Bellview. He had a Oh Two. Ih wz a,
modified.
Six cylinder::?
M. Oh yeah th//at's goin way ba:ck.
G. "(That's a lo:ng time ago).
G. Tha wz a ]o:ng time a//go.
M. Yeah.

26.
(1.0)
27. G. I usetuh go over there the://n 'n, jio:w, Rich Hawkins
28.
from Bellview drives one, fer some guys frm up't
29.
Bellview.
30. M. ((clears throat))

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Same-gender referents
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
*-51.

59

(0.4)
M. Yah.
G. He's my:: liddle sister's brother'n law.
(0.5)
G. He's a policem'n in Bellview b't he- (0.4) I guess
he's not afraid t'drive a ca:r.
(1.0)
G. I d'know what they have tuh drj:ve I haven'even been
over tuh see (im//lately)
M. It's a pretty good ca:r.
(4.2)
G. Evry time I wen over there I froze m'nu:ts.
(1.0)
M. hh hh//hh!
G. You always go over en ni- nice in the afternoon en you
go over there wi//th jus::]t shirtsleeves on 'er just a,
short sleeve shirt" n fore the night is over yer
freezin t'death.
M. Yeah.]
G. Yer not aHowed t'drhnk,
M. Hawkins the one thet hit Al last year over in
Finley
(AD:17-19)

Although the exact structure of this passage is not clear to me, it is

apparent that there are at least three male referents mentioned: Keegan
(line 1), Tucker (line 17),20 and Hawkins (line 27). Each of G's utterances
seems to be a turn expansion of his own preceding turn, and so we seem to
have something of a turn-chaining effect:
Keegan
Tucker
Hawkins
When M comes to produce his line 51, then, he must contend with the fact
that there seems to be a chain of at least three male referents in the preceding
talk. Now we can see that the lexical/semantic nature of M's line 51 could not
distinguish what pair he means to be "tying" to: first, there is no repetition of
lexical items from any of the preceding turns; and second, since all of the
men mentioned in the fragment are race-car drivers in Ohio, hitting
someone over in Finley is not a feature that distinguishes among them,
especially since both Keegan and Hawkins have been associated with the
agent role in events of driving (Keegan used to race. . . and Rich Hawkins
from Bellview drives one). Given the structure of M's utterance at line 51,

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60 Anaphora in conversational English

then, and the structure of the preceding talk, a pronominal reference would
have been ambiguous; M thus uses a full NP.21
Another instance of full NP used in a return pop where no other linguistic
devices are used to guide the recipient to the intended referent follows.
1. G.
2. C.
3. M.
4. G.
5.
6. M.
7. M.
8. G.
9.( )
10.
11. G.
12.
13. G.
14.
15.
16. C.
17.
18. C.
19. M.
20. M.
21. C.
22. M.
23.
24.
25. C.
26.

hhOh my Go-o-d that's a, topnotch society over the:re,

eh heh heh
((sniff//sniff))
eh-heh-heh eh(h) living aroun Bidwell en Greensprings
(with th(h)e // be(h)st) hhh hh
Yea:h.
We:ll,
They got nice ca:rs th.
(Yeh)
(3.0)
((clears throat))
(0.5)
Fraid tih g- (0.2) ((swallow)) go down there after
dj:rk, specially walking, hh
(0.6)
((vl)) Ahhhhhhh
(1.7)
Well Doug isn't too bad a gu:y,
No.
His bro//ther's a] n- =
He usetuh,]
=(Yeh) brother's a pretty nice guy I// spoze
probly the younger kids thet'r raisin hell over
there,
I::(0.5)

*-27. C. I know. I d- I know Dou:g en he isn't,

(AD:14-1S)
Two male referents appear in this passage, Doug (line 18), and his brother
(line 22). At line 27, C does a return pop to line 18, but uses a full NP to
perform the reference. He uses a full NP here (i) because the utterance does
not indicate, through use of lexical repetition, what pair it is tying to, and
(ii) because neither of the male referents has been associated with the role of
being known by someone. The return pop by itself thus does not uniquely
select a given piece of talk to return to, and the reference must therefore be
done with a more explicit form than a pronoun.
The same situation holds if two referents of the same gender are
mentioned in the same utterance or adjacency pair: if there is no repetition

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Same-gender referents

61

of lexical items, and if the semantic/grammatical roles associated with each

referent provide no help, then a full NP will be used to perform the
reference. Examples of this pattern follow.
C. He helped uh, Merkie build his T bucket up. I saw
Merkie's is un is a, darn nice lookin little bucket.
(AD:30)
We can treat the second sentence as a turn expansion of the first sentence. In
the first sentence, Little (he) is associated with the role of helping someone
build something, while Merkie is associated with the role of building. That
is, both referents are involved in an action process in the first sentence. The
second sentence, on the other hand, says nothing about the process, or
about the roles associated with the process; it is an assessment of the quality
of the thing built. Given the lack of reference-helpful information gleanable
from the utterance itself, a full NP is necessary to make the reference to
Merkie successful.
Another example of this pattern is given below.
1.
2.
3.
5.
6.

G. Yer not allowed t'dri:nk,

M. Hawkins the one thet hit Al last year over in Finley
en
4. (1.0)
M. flipped him 'n put A]22 in that bad accident.
G. Wzee
[
7. C. Oh rilly?
8. M. Yah. (2.0)
9. C. Al's a pretty damn good driver.
(AD: 19)
In this fragment we have two male referents mentioned, Hawkins and Al.
Both are known to be race-car drivers. Through M's talk at lines 2-5 we
associate Hawkins with the agent role in a transitive event and Al with the
patient role in that event. The reference I am focusing on here is the full NP
in C's line 9. The claim being made about this full NP is that (1) C's
utterance at line 9 does not repeat any of the lexical items from the preceding
utterances, and (2) that utterance does not utilize the semantic/grammatical
roles we have already associated with each referent (in fact, since both are
drivers, either one could be a "pretty damn good driver"). The utterance
itself does not help the recipient to pick out a unique referent, so to make the
reference successful, C uses a full NP.
The passages presented in this section are the only examples of anaphora
in the environment of same-gender referents that I found in my data.

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62 Anaphora in conversational English

Perhaps other patterns of anaphora will be uncovered in the future if a larger
database is used.
3.6

Non-structural factors in anaphora

In the preceding sections of this chapter, we have seen the basic structural
patterns which correlate with the distribution of anaphoric devices. In this
section I would like to demonstrate that, while those patterns are basic, they
are not always followed; that is, there are other, non-structural, factors
which influence anaphora. These non-structural factors are rarely discussed
in the literature on anaphora (Linde 1979 and Duranti 1984 are exceptions)
and thus it is particularly important to examine them here. 23
T h e non-structural factors I have isolated do not seem to form a coherent
group; at least, at this point I don't see any common principle at work in
them. I have therefore presented them below in a list format.

3.6.1

D isagreements

I found a few cases in which a referent was mentioned in a statement from

one participant and was then mentioned again in a disagreement with that
statement from the other participant; and this second mention was done
with a full N P .

R.
V.
R.
V.

Those'r Alex's tanks weren't they?

Podn' me?
Weren't-didn' they belong tuh Al//ex?
No: Alex ha(s) no tanks Alex is tryintuh buy my tank
(US:24)

C. Oxfrey runnin-I heard Oxfrey gotta new ca:r.

G. Hawkins is ru//nnin,
" M . Oxfrey's runnin the same car he run ]ast year,
(AD:8)
M.

Beer is even bedder den wine. Cause it give you more

nutrition. Joe lives on beer,
( ) Hnh
V. No. Joe don' live on beer.// Joe lives on, Joe eats.
(US:90)

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Non-structural factors

63

(Karen is co-present person)

S. You didn't come tuh talk tuh Karen?
(0.4)
*~M. No (0.2) Karen: (0.3)
*-M. Karen'n I 're having a fight after she went out with
Keith
(SN-4:4)
(M) (W't about Vinny. Did he talk about money?)
(2.0)
*-V.
(B't) Vinny didn' talk no money wid me
1.
2.
*-3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

A.
B.
A.
B.
A.
B.
A.
B.
A.
A.
B.

Hello
Is Jessie there?
(No) Jessie's over et 'er gramma's fer a couple da:ys.
A'right thankyou,
Yer welxome?
Bye.
Dianne?
Yeah.
OH I THOUGHT that w'z you.
Uh-she's over et Gramma Lizie's fer a couple days.
Oh okay,
(US:7-8)

In each of these examples, a statement or question is made by one

speaker, which is then disagreed with by the other participant, and the
references in both the statement/question and the disagreement are made
with full NPs. This environment does not always induce the use of a full
NP, however; a passage in which such a disagreement is made without a full
NP is given below.
C. How's uh,
(0.7)
(G) ((cle//ars throat))
C. Jimmy Linder.
(0.6)
C. He's he's pm the Usac. (0.1) trail//isn' he?
^ M . No. He isn't runnin Usac, he runs, just, (0.2) mainly
uh, asphalt now
(AD: 19-20)
Notice in this passage, though, that C's statement (which becomes a
question through the use of a tag) contains a pronoun and not a full NP; in

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64 Anaphora in conversational English

the examples above, both parts - the statement/question and the
disagreement - were done with full NPs (with the possible exception of the
Vinny example). I don't have enough instances of this phenomenon to know
if the presence of the full NP in the statement/question is crucial for the
anaphoric form used in the disagreement.
An investigation of the interactive work performed by this anaphoric
pattern is beyond the scope of this study. I point it out here because it
appears to go against the pattern discussed above, which says that if there is
a mention of a referent in an open sequence, then a pronoun can be used to
do a next mention of that referent.
3.6.2

know + NP: Overt recognitionals

In one of the transcripts, I found several instance of a full NP being used

when a pronoun would have been predicted by the patterns presented
earlier in the grammatical context of know + NP, or in some related context
in which the identity of a person is overtly displayed and negotiated. That
is, instead of saying something like (a), speakers were often found to say
something like (b):
(a)

A.
B.

Mary is visiting me this week.

I know her.

(b)

A.
B.

Mary is visiting me this week.

I know Mary.

In this pattern, a person is mentioned, either pronominally, or with a full

NP, and then is mentioned again in the same sequence in an utterance
(produced by any party) which stops the flow of talk to establish overtly that
the person's identity is known. The latter mention is done with a full NP.
The exact nature and motivation of this pattern is not apparent to me at
this time. I have given examples of the pattern below to demonstrate that it
is a real pattern.
V. En he ro:de] away on his bixycle.
M. Didju find Jim?
(0.5)
V. P(h)eddelin away yuh see,=
*-M. =Oh:: dey-dih-yeh- I-I know dih cat,
(US:2)

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Non-structural factors
V.

J.
*-J.

65

Yes, en I've seen the person before in your building

becuss I cornered them once, thinking it was the
father// of the son I wz// very mad.
e(hh)h!
Yeh. Uh-I dis wantuh know de person. That's all.
(US:43)

J. He-he-he's got- Yeh, yeh right! Jus// like that,

M. Hmmhh!
J. You know what I mean?
M. hh hh hih-hih-// hih-hih-hih
J. The hippy- type,
(10)
* J. hhh I know, he's onna top floor. I know dih guy
(US:66)
M. =No. I know (who) the guy. I know who d'//guy is.=
V. =Yeh.
V. He's ba::d.
[
* J. You know deh gu:y,
M. I know deh//guy.
(US:67)
D.

hhh] Cathy McCo:n]nen. Tha:t's th'name I'm// tryina

think of] =
C. Yeah, right.]
- D . =Dju r'//member Ca:thy,]
C. Right. I: r'mejmber// her.] =
D. Yeah.]
C. = Right.
(Clacia:16)
P.
C.

=Mkke siz there wz a big fight down there las'night,

Oh rilly?
(0.5)
P. With Keegan en, what. Paul// de Wajjjd?]
M. Paul de Wal]d. Guy out of,=
- C . =De Wa^ld yeah I// (know]//him.) 24
(AD:-9)
It seems that something about the environment of overtly discussing the
recognizability of a referent triggers the use of a full NP, even if the
conditions are such that the patterns given in preceding sections would
predict that a pronoun would be used.

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66 Anaphora in conversational English

3.6.3

Assessments

It has been noted by other researchers (for example, Duranti 1984) that a
speaker's attitudes towards characters can be displayed through the
anaphoric devices chosen to refer to those characters. In my own data I have
found something similar, in that it seems that speakers tend to use full NPs
to refer to people in an assessment situation, especially if the assessment is
negative (negative affect). Examples of full NPs in assessments are given
below. Notice that in each case we would have expected, on the basis of
patterns discussed earlier, that a pronoun would have been used.
V. Don' haftuh be a value whenever I do anything not
fuh my wife, my wife wantstuh know why, I did (it).

S.

Just think what good graining it-u Besides

Bill Steffie lives underneath th'm. () Pay
a hundrd'n fifty (h)en l(h)ive o(h)ver Bill Ste(h)ffie
hhhh
(Friedell:24)

M.
M.
V.
V.
J.
M.
V.
R.
V.
J.

(He's got a m- He got a bjcycle.)

(Y'get it) all the time. He always// bring his bicycle in en
outta the house.
En he does(0.7)
He does his // ( ).
(Onna) bicycle?
Ye//h.
Him.
(0.4)
Yeh.=
= Yih know,
But I cain't figyuh this guy with a bicycle
(US:68)

It is not clear to me why assessments should "induce" the use of full NPs.
Nonetheless, there seems to be a demonstrable pattern of this association in
the data I have examined.
3.6.4

First mentions

We noted at the beginning of this chapter that the first mention of a referent
in a sequence is done with a full NP. This pattern seems obvious enough.

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Non-structural factors

67

In several instances in my conversational data, however, I found first

mentions that were done with pronouns. These pronoun first mentions fell
into one class: first mentions whose referents belonged to a general class of
referents which was evoked by a frame (what Prince (1981) would call an
inferrable).
This type of first mention with pronoun is something like the familiar
frame-evoked definite NPs, as in
I read a really good book last night. The author was Dutch.
where author can be definite because of the mention of book - books tend to
be associated with authors, pages, covers, pictures, etc.; the first mention of
author is thus definite because of the frame associated with book.
In the instances of a frame-evoked pronoun first mention, the exact
identity of the referent seems to be unimportant; in a somewhat paradoxical
way, then, a pronoun is used when the recipient is incapable of identifying
the specific referent, and is in fact not expected even to try to identify the
referent. The class of referents is identifiable, however: and it is perhaps
this identity which the recipient is being invited to "resolve" by the use of the
pronoun (where all members of the class are seen as being basically the
same). Examples of this phenomenon are given below.
B. I'nna tell you on:e course.
(0.5)
A. (
)

f
B.
A.
B.
A.
B.
A.
A.
B.
A.
- B.

The mahthe mah:dern art. The twunnieth century a:rt

there's about eight brooks,
Mm//hm,
En I wentuh buy a book the other day I //went hh went =
(mm)
=downtuh N.Y.U. tuh get it becuz it's the only place thet
car//ries the book.
Mmm
Mmh
Teh! En it wz twun::ty do::lliz.
Oh my god.
(0.4)
Yeuh he- ez he wz handing me the book en he tol' me twunny
dolliz
(TG: 11-12)

In this passage, B is describing going to a bookstore to buy a book.

Bookstores have associated with them people who tell you how much the

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68 Anaphora in conversational English

books cost, and who take the money from you; hence, through the
bookstore frame such entities as tellers or checkers are as a class identifiable,
although no individual is directly identifiable through this frame. He in the
last line of this example refers to some member of one of these classes
(probably a clerk of some sort). His exact identity is utterly unimportant to
the report that's being made - it is his identity as a member of a class of
people who know things like the price of a particular book that is important
here.
B. Ih wz, I don'know what I'm gunnuh do. hEn all the reading
is from this one book so f(h)ar the(h)t I haven' go(h)t!
A. hhhhhhhh!
*- B. hhhh So she tol' me of a place on Madison Avenue 'n Sevendy
Ninth Street. =
(TG:13)
The university class is associated with several items - teacher, books, chairs,
work, etc. In this example, we seem to have a first reference to the teacher
made with a pronoun. Here again, the exact identity of the teacher is
unimportant (and in fact unavailable to the recipient).
N.

u-htOh::,
()
H. Bu:t

t
N.
H.
*-H.

My f: face hurts, =
=W't-
()
Oh what'd he do tih you.

It is shared knowledge for H and N that N has had an appointment to do

something about her acne. Face here is thus a frame for dermatologist, so
even though the exact identity of the dermatologist may be unknown to her,
H can use a pronoun to refer to the dermatologist.
N.
H.
N.
-H.

Eh least you know he was ho:me,=

=nihh phhig thhea(h)I =
=pn a // Thursday ni(h)ght (hn)
hihh ( ) hhhhh She coulda been ly(h)ing ri'next to
him
(HG:II:24)

Although the pronoun in the last line of this passage could refer to a specific
person known to both H and N, it is more likely that it is just one of a class of

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Non-structural factors

69

entities that is being referred to with the pronoun. If this ethnographic

assumption is correct, then this passage is another instance in which a
pronoun is used to refer to "just another" member of a category.
In each of the passages above, the pronoun in question could be replaced
with a category label, such as clerk, doctor, or teacher. It is not clear to me
why the speakers in these cases have chosen pronouns over category labels,
but the pattern is real nonetheless.
3.6.5

Demarcating a new unit

We saw in earlier sections that it is the basic pattern in conversation for a

reference to be done with a pronoun if the sequence containing mention of
the relevant referent is not yet closed, even across adjacency-pair
boundaries. There seem to be situations, however, in which the new
adjacency pair is treated as a somewhat separate unit from the preceding
material; the new unit can be demarcated with a pre-pre {Can I ask you a
question?, Let me tell you something, etc.) or some other demarcating
device. In addition, it seems that the reference in such a new unit can be
made with a full NP instead of the expected pronoun.25
There are obvious weaknesses in this particular analysis. For one thing, it
is not clear how one can provide independent support - aside from the full
NP - that the unit being constructed is viewable as a new unit; after all, not
every new adjacency pair starts with a full NP. What makes one pair a
separate unit while another is to be considered a non-separate unit? For the
instances in which another demarcating device besides the anaphoric form
appears (a pre-pre, for example), the issue of circularity is less pressing; in
other cases, even if the analysis is valid for the interactants, the issue of
circularity might make it untestable and hence not very useful as a
hypothesis about the world. In spite of these difficulties, however, I feel
that this analysis is worth exploring.
Consider the following examples.
V. I getta attitude behind dis, Jim came in heuh befa:w,
M. If I git into- y'know y'know now I'll tellyuh
d'reason.
V. Jim came down tuh flash his money.
(0.5)
M. If I // git intoV. Y'know he got his income tax tuhday, hh en his wz,
saying, c'mon// let's chip in fuh the boddle en he//
threw money- hh

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70 Anaphora in conversational English

M.
M.
R.
V.
M.
J.
*-M.
M.

Yeh.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now he threw money onna ta:ble.
Who//o.
He's no:t uh, he's not a spendthrift Jim.
Oh wuh lemme tellyuh now.
I put fi'dolluhs'n Jim gave me (
)//
yesterday I'm goin tuhnight.=
V. Okay.
M. =You'll have 'em- eh you'll have 'm tuhnight. Seven uh
clock eight uh'clock I'll bring "em over t'yer house.
(US: 76-77)

In this passage, the new unit is marked first with now I'll tell you the reason
and then with Oh well let me tell you now (a type of pre-pre, presumably),
and contains a full NP even though the unit is tied to an action in which the
same referent (Jim) is mentioned.
M.
K.
M.
M.

M.
M.
M.

M.
M.

K.
M.
K.
M.

A:nd ( ) as far as that goes my father's on his honeymoon. =

= yah ha:h hah
Oh::. Very//nice Where'd he go.
(Ye:ah)
Well I hed thought he was going tuh Acapulco because it was
such a hush hush se//cret where he'd be go:ing.
((door closing))
(0.8)
'n I thought he didn' want anybody t'know er sum'ing
(0.3)
But
(1.1)
Indee:d he did not go t'Acapulco. Where did he go? He
went up north.
(0.5)
They just, travelled up north end u::m,
(0.5")
I guess it's okay he's gonna be gone fer about another
week
(0.8)
You ]ike the ]ady?
(0.4)~
She's nixe. She's a nice lady.I like her.
(0.3)
Ah//hh
Friendly.
(1.0)

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Non-structural factors

71

M. B't-the ba:d thing was thet um::, (0.3) I hadtuh

mo:ve my dad's furniture
(0.7)
M. from his place in Sanna Monica = I had tuh have
let the movers in (-) so.
(0.7)
M. Being to:tally drunk from that orgy on Saturday night
I (h'd) t'get up (0.2) en go do:wn. (0.2) (Sanna)
Monica with Hillery.
In this instance, M starts a new unit - a story - with but the bad thing was
that I had to move my dad's furniture. Although this new unit contains a
mention of a referent that had appeared in the preceding talk, the mention is
done with a full NP because the beginning of a new unit is a place where full
NPs can be used for otherwise retrievable referents. It is thus my claim that
the motivation for using a full NP (my dad) is to display that the utterance
produced here begins a new unit (a story that also serves as a complaint).
Another example of this pattern follows.
M. So you dating Keith?
(1.0)
K. He's a friend.
(0.5)
M. What about that girl he use tuh go with fer so long
K. Ajlice?
K. I//don't-] think (they're about),
M. myeh]
(0.4)
M. (Wha-?)
K. I dunno where she is but I(0.9)
K. Talks about her evry so often but I dunno where she js
(0.5)
M. hmh
(0.2)
S. Alice was stra:nge
(0.3)
M. Very o:dd. She usetuh call herself a prostitute
(SN-4:29-30)
Here we have a return pop (S's last utterance, back to M's question What
about that girl he used to go with for so long?) done with a full NP, even
though there are no competing referents. Again, it is claimed that the unit
started by S's utterance is displayed as separate from what has gone before.

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72 Anaphora in conversational English

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

C. Keegan still go out?

M. Keegan's
M. out there he's,
M. He run,
(0.5)
M. E://r he's uh:
G. Wuhyih mean my:,]
G. My//brother in law's out there,]
M. doin real good this year'n] M'Gilton's doin real
good

(AD:8)
In this passage, M uses a full NP in a second-pair part (line 2) even though
we have seen that usually a pronoun is used in a second-pair part if the same
referent is mentioned in the first-pair part. M's full NP here (i.e. Keegan) is
used to begin a new unit - a list unit of who is around and doing well,
which he then continues with M'Gilton. It is the separateness of M's unit
(that is, that he is not answering C's question but also creating an internally
complex unit on his own) that facilitates the use of a full NP here.
3.6.6

Replacing an action

In producing an utterance, a speaker may not be doing "more" of what has

come before; s/he may be replacing, or producing a "substitute" for, an
utterance which was previously produced. One way the speaker can show
that the current utterance is a replacement for a previous utterance is to use
the same anaphoric device that was used in that previous utterance; in other
words, the speaker will not shift from a full NP to a pronoun, as we might
expect from our structural rules, but will re-use the full NP. In addition, in
most cases of replacing, other words beside the full NP will be re-used.
These repeats of lexical items are another clue to the replacement nature of
the utterance. Several examples of this replacement phenomenon are given
below.
V.

My wife//caught d'ki:d,=

R. Yeh.
V.
V.
V.

lightin a fiyuh in Perry's celluh last year

deh usetuh be a lotta fiyuhs in 666.
Remember?
My wife caught th'kid lightin a fiyuh.
(US:4)

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Non-structural factors

73

Here there is a nearly exact repeat of the utterance, done with the same
anaphoric forms as in the original utterance. My claim here is that V's last
utterance is intended to be a replacement for his first.
A common type of replacement occurs when an utterance is in overlap
with someone else's talk, or is not sequentially implicative for the
subsequent talk; in this case the utterance is treated by its speaker as if the
other parties had not "heard" it and it is reproduced (possibly with some
variation from the first try) using the anaphoric form used in the original
utterance. An example of a speaker replacing a previous try with a new one is
given below (the replacements occur at lines 11 and 13):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
*-ll.
12.
13.

M. Keegan's
M. out there he's
M. He run,
(0.5)
M. E://r he's uh::
G. Wuhyih mean my:,]
G. My//brother in law's out there,]
M. doin real good this year'n] M'Gilton's
doin real good thi//s year,
C. M'Gilton still there? =
G. =hhHawki//ns
C. Oxfrey runnin-I heard Oxfrey gotta new ca:r.
G. Hawkins is runnin
(AD:8)

The next example represents an interesting switch on the part of the

speaker from one perspective (Fillmore 1968) on an event to another
perspective on that same event. That is, selling and buying are merely two
sides of the same coin; in one, the person with the money appears
grammatically in an oblique phrase, while in the other, that same person
appears grammatically in a subject phrase. For whatever reason, in this
instance M has chosen to replace the first utterance with a clause that treats
the person with the money (Vinny) as the subject of the clause, rather than
as an oblique phrase. The second sentence also replaces the imperative
structure of the first sentence with a reassurance structure. The second
sentence does not exactly redo the first sentence; rather, it is meant as a
replacement for the first.
M.

=Th'barbuh pole sell tuh Vinny. Y'know- Vinny'll buy

the barbuh pole.
(US:8)

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74 Anaphora in conversational English

The following passage further illustrates the use of full NP in
accomplishing a replacement utterance.
N.

I- c- 1 rilly b'lieve him cz another doctor tol'

me that {too:,
(0.4)
N. A doctor et school tol' me the exac'same thing he
said it's j's something new they're discovering y'know
hhh 's like-

N first uses the phrase another doctor in another doctor told me that too. She
then says a doctor at school told me the exact same thing; are we to infer
from this that she has talked to two other doctors who told her the same
thing? Clearly not. What we are meant to hear with N's a doctoral school
utterance is a replacement of her earlier utterance another doctor told me,
with some additional information (adding authority?) about the doctor and
a re-characterization of what was told.
Two adjacent full NPs can thus be heard as coreferential, in a sense, if the
second is designed to be a replacement for the first.
Another instance of a type of replacement is given below.
M. Hawkins the one thet hit Al last year over in Finley en,
(10)
M. flipped him 'n put A] in that bad accident.
(AD: 19)
In this passage, M gives a characterization of a complex event (someone
getting hit in a racing accident), then goes on to give a detail of that event
(someone getting flipped). He has thus moved from a general, higher-level
view to an action-by-action view. In the next clause, however, he returns to
the higher-level view to re-characterize the complex event (a bad accident).
Since he returns to the general view after starting an action-by-action view,
he can be heard to be replacing his original characterization of the general
view with a new characterization (possibly to indicate that the accident was
worse than was suggested by his first characterization). In this last clause he
goes back to the full NP - further indication that he is replacing the first
clause and not the second: the first contains a full NP while the second
contains a pronoun, and since we have seen that a replacement utterance
uses the same anaphoric form as the utterance it is replacing, the
replacement (which uses a full NP) must in this case be replacing the clause
with the full NP.

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Summary 75
One final example of this phenomenon is given below.
M. Soon ez Sonny gets back frm the stoh. = Sonny's up et the stoh.
J. Uh hu//h?
[
M. Waif II he gets back.
(US:45)
In this passage, the first sentence from M is "replaced" by the next two
sentences from M: in the first sentence, the fact that Sonny is at the store is
presupposed (you can't come back from someplace unless you're already
there); in the replacement sentences, this presupposition is made explicit,
and what had been done in one clause26 is now broken up into two main
clauses. The point to be made here is that M starts the replacement sentence
with a full NP, even though the referent had just been mentioned in the
immediately preceding clause.
3.6.7

Interim summary

We have seen in this section that, while structural factors establish the basic
patterns of anaphora in conversation, they are not the only factors involved
in any given choice of anaphoric device. That is, there are factors outside of
sequences, adjacency pairs, return pops, etc. that influence which device
will be selected in particular environments. These other factors represent a
wide range of conditions, and it is not yet clear that there is any single
feature which would hold them all together; nonetheless, they function for
our purposes here as a group because they have the interesting effect of
"inducing" the use of one anaphoric device in a structural environment in
which we could have expected the other device. Thus, although structural
properties are crucial in understanding the overall patterns of anaphora in
conversation, our description would be misleading and incomplete if we
ignored the influence of factors such as disagreements, assessments, and
overt recognitionals.

3.7 Summary
In this chapter we identified and traced various patterns of anaphora in
English conversations. It was claimed that as long as a sequence is not yet
closed - if it is not a same-gender environment - a referent within that
sequence could be mentioned using a pronoun (cf. Thavenius 1983). The

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76 Anaphora in conversational English

methods by which speakers create the interpretation of a sequence being
opened (or closed) were examined in relation to the general issue of
anaphora.
In order to understand certain types of long-distance pronominalization
and instances of pronominalization in the presence of same-gender
referents, we identified a structural organization which was called return
pop. With a return pop the speaker ties, not to the most recent adjacency
pair, but to a pair that is superordinate to that; with this move, the
intervening material is closed down. In most cases a return pop is done with
a pronoun. These findings are in keeping with the work on anaphora done
by researchers in natural language processing (Grosz 1977; Reichman
1981; Sidner 1983; Guindon 1986).
It was also shown that if two referents of the same gender are mentioned
in the same sequence, then the device used for any next reference to one of
them will be constrained by lexical and grammatical associations with them.
In addition we saw that under certain conditions both same-gender
referents could be realized by pronouns. This finding goes against the
claims made by Reichman (1981) in her study of anaphora, in which she
proposes that only one referent can be in high focus at any given time, and
that a pronoun can only be used if its referent is currently in high focus,
thereby disallowing the possibility of two non-coreferential pronouns in the
same utterance.
Finally, in contrast with the proposals of most researchers, it was shown
here that structural properties alone do not account for all of the patterns of
anaphora exhibited in English conversations; environments such as
disagreements, assessments, new units, and overt recognitionals are places
where one type of anaphoric device is used when structurally we could have
expected the other type.

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4 Rhetorical structure analysis

The structure of expository prose has captured the interest of a wide range
of disciplines, including rhetoric (Dillon 1981; Young et al. 1970;
D'Angelo 1975; Winterowd 1975), cognitive psychology (van Dijk and
Kintsch 1983; Meyer and Rice 1982; De Beaugrande 1980; Bransford
1979; Sanford and Garrod 1981; Britton and Black 1985), artificial
intelligence (Alvarado 1986; Schank 1982; Brown 1985; McKeown 1982)
and linguistics (Hinds 1979; Grimes 1975; Kamp 1981). While several of
these studies have designed detailed and insightful notations for representing the hierarchical structure of expository prose (for example, the
macrostructures of van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; the argument units of
Alvarado 1986; the rhetorical schemas of McKeown 1982; the conceptual
graph structures of Graesser and Goodman 1985; the structures of Meyer
1985), none of them provides all that is needed for an in-depth exploration
of anaphora. For this study it was necessary to have a notation with the
following characteristics:
Ability to represent a fairly complete range of argumentation relations. A model was
needed that would provide relations like evidence, background, summary,
justification,
Flexibility of combination. Given the range of texts examined (obituaries,
biography, announcements, feature articles), it was important that the basic units be
combinable in a relatively free way, rather than tightly constrained, as in a
grammar.1
Ability to represent texturing. It is now widely recognized that not all parts of a text
hold the same communicative importance - some information is presented as central
to the goals of the text and some as peripheral (Hopper and Thompson 1980;
Grimes 1975). It was critical that the model be capable of capturing in some explicit
way this distinction between central and peripheral for each basic unit.
The system I found that satisfied these conditions was rhetorical structure
analysis (Mann et al. 1982), based in part on Grimes 1975 and McKeown
1982.2 Rhetorical structure analysis forms the basis of the analyses in

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78 Rhetorical structure analysis

Chapter 5, and is described in some detail below. This approach is not yet
well developed, and the following discussion is offered only as a first
approximation to what such a framework would look like in its complete
form.

4.1 Rhetorical structure concepts

The basic assumption underlying rhetorical structure analysis is that texts
are not merely strings of clauses but are instead groups of hierarchically
organized clauses which bear various informational and interactional
relations to one another (cf. van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Mandler and
Johnson 1977; Dillon 1981; Meyer and Rice 1982). The model thus has in
its apparatus a basic unit - the proposition - and a class of text-structures
which describe the structures which the proposition display. I will present
each of these components in turn.
4.1.1

Propositions

The smallest unit of text in this framework is called the proposition. A

proposition is more abstract than a clause or sentence, and is intended to
represent the smallest unit that enters into informational and/or interactional relationships with other parts of the text. The propositions of rhetorical
structure analysis are not equivalent to the propositions of Kintsch's work
(Kintsch 1974); they are closer to the statement nodes of Graesser and
Goodman (1985) or the idea units of Mayer (1985). They are often
equivalent to clauses but need not be; for example, relative clauses are
treated as belonging with their modified clause in one proposition, rather
than as their own propositions. The same is true for most complement
clauses. The motivation behind this treatment of relative and complement
clauses is the belief that such clauses tend to be governed by principles of
grammar rather than by principles of discourse, and hence are less closely
involved with principles of organization. The use of an abstract unit is not
necessary for the application of the rest of the model, however; clauses
could be used just as effectively.3

4.1.2

R-structures

We have seen that, within this model of discourse, texts are treated as
hierarchically organized groups of propositions (or clauses). The groups

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Rhetorical structure concepts

79

into which the propositions are arranged are represented here by what are
called R-structures (which stands for rhetorical structures). Most Rstructures consist of a core portion and an ancillary portion, called the
nucleus and adjunct respectively. The nucleus realizes the main goals of the
writer, and the adjunct provides supplementing information for the
material in the nucleus. Not all R-structures have this internal make-up,
however; there are a few that consist only of nuclei (the List structure, for
example), and at least one that has a nucleus and several adjuncts.
R-structures are drawn with their label at the top (such as "Conditional"),
and several lines descending from the top. The nucleus is represented in the
diagrams with a straight vertical line coming down from the R-structure
label, and the adjunct is represented with an arcing line coming out of the
bottom of the nucleus line. The arcing line is labeled with the name of the
relation which holds between the nucleus and the adjunct (reason, for
example). This relation label is usually identical to the label for the
R-structure itself; in some cases, however, the relation carries a different
label from that of the structure. Table 4.1 lists all the R-structures used in
this study and their internal structure. 4
Table 4.1 R-structures
R-structure name

Internal structure

Issue
Conditional
Circumstance
List
Narrate
Reason
Concession
Opposition
Purpose
Response
Contrast

One nucleus, three optional adjuncts

One nucleus, one adjunct
One nucleus, one adjunct
Unlimited number of nuclei, no adjuncts
Unlimited number of nuclei, no adjuncts
One nucleus, one adjunct
One nucleus, one adjunct
One nucleus, one adjunct
One nucleus, one adjunct
One nucleus, one adjunct
Unlimited number of nuclei, or: one nucleus, one adjunct

Each unit can be realized either by terminal nodes - i.e. propositions or

by another R-structure. That is, R-structures build upon one another to
construct the entire text. We therefore have simple R-structures, with all of
their slots (nuclei and adjuncts) realized by propositions, and complex
R-structures, which have at least one of their slots realized by an embedded
R-structure. The notion of embedding5 will be crucial in the discussion of
anaphora and text-structure in Chapter 5.
The R-structures are described and illustrated below.

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80 Rhetorical structure analysis

4.1.2.1 Issue
The Issue structure 6 is the most powerful organizing unit within the model,
and usually occurs as the top-most unit of the text. The Issue structure
presents a claim, and provides at least one of three types of supplemental
material: details about the claim (called an elaboration adjunct); evidence
in support of the claim (called an evidence adjunct); and background
information for the claim (called a background adjunct).7 For example, a
typical structure for a short obituary is to present the news of the death (the
nucleus of the Issue structure), plus some details about the circumstances of
the death (an elaboration adjunct on the nucleus), and then to give
background information about the deceased which makes the death
"newsworthy" (a background adjunct). The structure of such a text would
be diagrammed in the figure below.
elaboration

Issue
I background

A real example of the Issue structure is given below (the propositions are
numbered so that the diagram can be more easily followed).
(1)
(2)

(3)
(4)
(5)

Naftaly S. Glasman has been appointed dean of the Graduate School

of Education at Santa Barbara.
A professor of education, Glasman has been a member of the UCSB
faculty since 1968 and acting dean of the School of Education since
January.
He has served as chairman of the faculty committee on effective
teaching
and has chaired and organized two national conferences on effective
teaching.
Recently he was appointed to a statewide committee on the
professions, as part of the UC graduate student affirmative action
program. {University Bulletin, June 28, 1980)
Issue

background
^

^background
^
"background

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Rhetorical structure concepts

81

The entire text can be represented with an Issue structure. The first
proposition is the nucleus of the text, in that it provides the news which the
text is intended to convey. The other four propositions are background
adjuncts - they do not provide evidence for the claim "X has been appointed
dean," nor do they provide details about the appointment; rather they
provide background information which elucidates the claim. This fact is
represented by four separate background adjuncts.8
The Issue structure thus has a unique internal structure (one nucleus and
many adjuncts) and often occupies a unique place in the structure of a text the topmost node.
4.1.2.2 List
The List structure is another of the most prevalent and powerful organizing
units. It has an unlimited number of nuclei (as many as there are items in the
list) and no adjuncts. Each item is seen as a member of the List unit, rather
than as a separate adjunct, because of the impression they create of each
being one in a series (hence they are each only part of a larger unit). In
addition, the members of the list are presented as equal. Syntactic
parallelism is extremely common in this structure. 9
(1)
(2)
(3)

He knew his Rousseau;

he knew his Voltaire;
he even knew his President de Brosses! (Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A
House of Lions, p. 39)
List

(1)
(2)
(3)

He spoke continuously for three hours from a platform in Memorial

Park during Claremont's 1979 Fourth of July festivities.
The next year, at the same rostrum, he stretched it out four hours.
The next Fourth of July, on a similar platform half a continent away,
he talked nearly six hours. (Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1983)
List

In these examples, each piece is one in a series. Note the strong parallelism
in syntactic and lexical structure within each List structure.

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82 Rhetorical structure analysis

4.1.2.3 Narrate
Narrate is the third and last of the higher-level R-structures. Like the List
structure, Narrate has an unlimited number of nuclei and no adjuncts.
Within this structure, however, each piece describes a temporally situated
action which follows the last action in the temporal sequence. This structure
allows a short narrative to be part of an expository text
(1)
(2)
(3)

Word reaches him that his masters . . . have changed their minds yet
again on a major issue.
Rochac dictates a new strategy. . . .
One more crisis overcome, he cuts the tension with his favorite
catchphrase. (People, May 26, 1984)
Narrate

(1)
(2)
(3)

Within seconds, Chico has spotted the van.

He is walking toward it, crying, "Where is my little buddy? Where's
my little Trevor?"
Soon the derelict is hugging and kissing the boy. (People, March 26,
1984)
Narrate

4.1.2.4 Reason
Unlike the preceding structures, the Reason structure usually occurs at the
lower levels of the text, and often is realized directly by terminal nodes
(propositions). This R-structure has a nucleus which makes a statement
about something and an adjunct which provides the reason for that
statement (either the reason for making it or the reason for it being so).
Examples of the Reason structure appear below.
(1)
(2)

Last year the Irish government boycotted the celebration

because the grand marshal was IRA fundraiser Michael Flannery.
(People, March 19, 1984)
Reason
reason

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Rhetorical structure concepts

83

Here the second proposition provides the reason for the situation described
by the first.
(1)
(2)

Buy only enough for immediate use

as they spoil rather easily. {Joy of Cooking, cited in Mann et al. 1982)
Reason

Here again, the second proposition provides the reason for doing the action
described in the first.
4.1.2.5 Circumstance
The Circumstance structure is another of the lower-level structures. In it,
the nucleus describes a situation and the adjunct gives information about
the circumstances under which the situation occurred (or will occur).
Circumstance differs from the background relation, in that Circumstance
immediately situates a process in time or space, while background gives
information of various types which helps the reader understand the nuclear
material. Examples of the Circumstance structure are given below.
(1)
(2)

When Victoria came to the throne,

he was living in a comfortable house in or near Tavistock Square. (A
House of Lions, p. 19)
Circumstance
circumstance

of

~^>

In this passage, the first proposition provides the circumstances and the
second provides the situation. The first proposition is thus diagrammed as
the adjunct of the structure, and the second is the nucleus.
(1)
(2)

When we visited our in-laws in Florida a couple of years ago,

a sign flapped on the front door that read. . . . (Erma Bombeck
column, cited in Mann et al. 1982)
Circumstance
circumstance

c?5

"

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84 Rhetorical structure analysis

Here again, the first proposition is the adjunct of the Circumstance
structure and the second proposition is the nucleus of the structure.
4.1.2.6

Conditional

The Conditional structure is very similar to the Circumstance structure: the

adjunct provides the conditions under which the nucleus holds. The
conditions in this case are usually hypothetical.
(1)
(2)

If Judy Blume were the protagonist of a novel,

she'd be pretty hard to stomach. (People, March 19, 1984)
Conditional
conditional

In this piece of text, the first proposition is the adjunct stating the conditions
under which the nucleus, realized by the second proposition, holds.
(1)
(2)

If something like this happens twice to the same woman,

it is time for her to find what [game] she has been playing. (E. Berne,
Games People Play)
Conditional
conditional

Again, the first proposition is the adjunct and the second is the nucleus.
4.1.2.7 Response
In the Response structure, a problem or question is posed by the writer
which is then responded to with some sort of solution or answer. In this
structure, the answer is the nucleus and the question is the adjunct.
(1)
(2)

What if you're having to clean floppy drive heads too often?

Ask for SYNCOM diskettes. (Byte magazine, cited in Mann et al. 1982)
Response
solution

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Rhetorical structure concepts

85

The first proposition, the question, is the adjunct and the second
proposition, the answer, is the nucleus.
(1)

What was this carapace which Leonard Woolf carried for seventy
years . . . ?
(2) He had above all an unusual capacity to control his feelings. (A House
of Lions, p. 24)
Response
solution

4.1.2.8. Purpose
As one would expect, the Purpose structure has a nucleus which describes
some situation and an adjunct which describes the purpose which that
situation is intended to fulfill.
(1)
(2)

Allow the terrapin to cool on its back

in order to trap the juices. (Joy of Cooking, cited in Mann et al. 1982)

(1)
(2)

Ana Maria stayed,

to work within the system. (People, March 26, 1984)

In both of these examples the purpose adjunct occurs as the second

proposition; the first proposition is the nucleus.
4.1.2.9 Opposition
With the Opposition structure, the writer presents two sides of a situation one, the adjunct, is the side not sympathized with, and the other, the
nucleus, is the side the writer really supports. This structure is often
realized with the phrase rather than, or with the pattern "not X but Y."
(1)

Rather than winning them with arms,

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86 Rhetorical structure analysis

(2)

we'd win them by our example (Letter to the editor of the Christian
Science Monitor, cited in Mann et al. 1982)

(1)

But I don't think endorsing a specific nuclear freeze proposal is

appropriate for CCC.
We should limit our involvement in defense and weaponry to matters
of process. (Common Cause, The Insider, July 1982)

(2)

4.1.2.10

Concession

The Concession structure differs from the Opposition structure in that it

offers material in the adjunct which is possibly at odds with the material in
the nucleus, and concedes that this conflicting state may hold. The writer
thus does not, in this case, reject the validity of the material in the adjunct.
(1)
(2)

While FitzGerald doesn't have a quarrel with this year's grand

marshal . . .
he is annoyed by the selection of IRA fugitive Michael O'Rourke.
{People, March 19, 1984)
Concession
concession

(1)
(2)

While we believe the distribution of this information is of benefit to

our subscribers,
we firmly respect the wishes of any subscriber who does not want to
receive such promotional literature. (Note to subscribers of Byte
magazine, cited in Mann et al. 1982)

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Rhetorical structure concepts

87

In each case, the conceding adjunct is given in the first proposition and the
nucleus material is given in the second proposition.
4.1.2.11 Contrast
The Contrast structure comes in two forms: in the first, all the contrasted
items are of equal status in the presentation of the material; in the second,
one item is being contrasted with another item, where the latter has more
focal status than the former. In the first case, the Contrast structure consists
of multiple nuclei, in the second case of a nucleus and an adjunct. Examples
of the multiple-nuclei Contrast are given below.
(1)
(2)

One was deep and manly;

the other was tiny and a squeak. (A House of Lions, p. 34)
Contrast

(1)
(2)

One airport source said the gunmen may have gone to a nearby Shiite
shanty-town called Hayya Seloum,
but authorities weren't sure what had happened to them. (News item
in the UCLA Daily Bruin, cited in Thompson, class lectures)
Contrast

4.1.3

The Joint

The Joint schema is similar to the list structure in that it is multi-nucleid,

but is different from List in that the pieces are not presented as members of a
series. The pieces of a Joint structure simply work together to realize
whatever R-structure they are embedded in. Any R-structure can have
either its nucleus or its adjunct realized with a Joint schema. The effect is
something like rhetorical conjunction (which is not always equivalent to
syntactic conjunction). An example of the Joint schema is given below.
(1)
(2)

I personally favor the initiative

and ardently support disarmament negotiations. (Common Cause,
The Insider, July 1982)
Joint

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88 Rhetorical structure analysis

4.1.4

Floating relations

In addition to the relations which exist within R-structures - for example,

Reason, Circumstance - there arefloatingrelations which are not associated
with any particular R-structure. These floating relations can occur between
a proposition of any R-structure and another proposition. The floating
relations used in this study are Summary, Conclusion, Result, and
Assessment. A brief description of each follows.
The Summary relation provides a summary of the material to which it is
scoped. The summarizing material can have any R-structure as its
realization, and can be as simple as a single proposition or as complex as a
multi-layered embedding.
[at the end of a lengthy article entitled '"No First Use' of Nuclear Weapons"]
The adoption of a no-first-use policy would have profound consequences. In
contrast to arms-control measures, which rarely constrain the actual use of weapons,
a no-first-use policy would transform the conceptual foundation on which military
strategy and planning rest. . . . (Scientific American, March 1984)
The structure of this passage in relation to the text it summarizes can be
represented as follows:
Summary
Text

The Conclusion relation provides information which is inferred from

other facts already presented (by whatever method of reasoning the author
cares to use, not necessarily deduction). It thus differs from the Summary
relation in that it offers information which has not yet been brought up,
while the Summary relation merely repeats in capsule form what has already
been presented.
[at the end of a book review]
All in all, given the difficulty in keeping up with even basic research of the caliber
that these authors produce, it is hard to see why the editors bothered publishing this
collection. (Language 60(1), 1984)
The structure of the relationship between this passage and the material it
draws its inference from is given below.
conclusion
Text
The Result relation describes circumstances which are the result of some
set of other circumstances.

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Rhetorical structure concepts

(1)
(2)

89

For years Leonard knew how not to feel - how to distance himself from
intimacy.
This made for an uneasy calm. (A House of Lions, p. 24)

The Assessment relation provides the author's comments and evaluations

on a portion of text. In some instances an Assessment looks very much like a
Conclusion, since the author uses a group of propositions on which to base
an inferenced statement; in the case of an Assessment, however, the
statement is clearly evaluative (either positive or negative), while in the case
of a Conclusion the statement can be simply informational. An example of
the Assessment relation follows.
"When I left for St. Paul's in 1894," he wrote with a note of distinct pride years
later, "the atmosphere had changed from that of a sordid brothel to that more
appropriate to fifty fairly happy small boys under the age of fourteen." Leonard was
a reformer from the first. (A House of Lions, p. 23)
In this passage the line Leonard was a reformer from the first is in an
Assessment relation to the material that precedes it. This relation can be
diagrammed in the following way.
assessment
Text
4.1.5

Embedding

The examples given above have illustrated R-structures using simple data that is, structures realized by terminal nodes. In this section, we shall
examine some more complex data - texts that exhibit embedding.
Any of the pieces of an R-structure can be realized by another
R-structure; that is, either the nucleus or the adjunct (or any of the nuclei in
a multi-nuclei structure) can be realized not directly by a proposition but
textually by an embedded R-structure. Short examples of embedded
structures appear below.
(1)
(2)
(3)

I personally favor the initiative

and ardently support disarmament negotiations to reduce the risk of
war.
But I don't think endorsing a specific nuclear freeze proposal is
appropriate for CCC.

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90 Rhetorical structure analysis

(4)

We should limit our involvement in defense and weaponry to matters

of process. (Common Cause, The Insider, July 1982)
Concession
concession
Joint

Opposition

opposition

The structure which encompasses this entire chunk of text is a

Concession structure. The Concession structure displays embeddings at
both slots; its nucleus is realized by an Opposition structure, and its adjunct
is realized by a Joint structure. The Joint structure is realized directly by
propositions 1 and 2 (they present the material which is conceded), and the
Opposition structure is realized by propositions 3 and 4 (the real viewpoint
against which the concession is made). The Opposition structure itself
consists of a proposition which presents a side of the argument not adhered
to by the writer (proposition 3) and a proposition which presents the
author's real point of view (proposition 4). Since proposition 4 is the
nucleus of the embedded structure which realizes the nucleus of the higher
structure, it is the nucleus of the entire passage. Taken together, all the
propositions realize the Concession structure.
This passage, being complex, raises the interesting issue of rhetorical
scope. That is, if propositions 1 and 2 are adjuncts, what are they adjuncts
to? Are they adjuncts just to proposition 4 (the main nucleus of the passage),
or are they adjuncts to the entire nucleus of their structure, which happens
to be realized by an embedded R-structure? The answer is clearly the latter.
An adjunct has within its scope its nucleus, even if that nucleus is realized by
another R-structure (and even if that R-structure is realized by another
R-structure, and so on, indefinitely); and of course the reverse is also true: a
nucleus has within its scope its adjunct, regardless of the internal structure
of that adjunct. Using scoping arguments of this type often helps to
understand the relative levels of R-structures, and in turn the hierarchical
organization of texts.
(1)
(2)

What to do?
Simply send for Harry Fujita, 47, the founder of Iwasaki Images of
America and the Picasso of fake foods.

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Validity in the analyses

(3)

91

Fujita's Torrance, Calif, factory can turn out munchable-looking

wax-and-vinyl copies of virtually anything. (People, March 19, 1984)
Response
solution
Reason

In this passage the highest structure is a Response structure (questionanswer), with the adjunct realized by proposition 1 and the nucleus realized
by an embedded Reason structure, which is realized by propositions 2 and
3. Note that propositions 2 and 3 are in a response relation to proposition 1,
not a reason relation (they are in a reason relation to one another). The
nucleus of the embedded Reason structure is proposition 2, and since the
Reason structure realizes the nucleus of the higher structure, proposition 2
is the nucleus for the passage.

4.2 Validity in the analyses

In analyzing the texts for this study, it was my goal to construct analyses that
approached the rhetorical structures intended by the author of the text in
question. This goal is obviously not perfectly attainable, since as readers we
bring our own experience, interests, and needs to the process of
constructing an interpretation of a text (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983).
However, in each case I tried to construct an analysis that was probable
(Hirsch 1967: 236):
To establish a reading as probable it isfirstnecessary to show, with reference to the
norms of language, that it is possible. This is the criterion of legitimacy: the reading
must be permissible within the public norms of the language in which the text was
composed. The second criterion is that of correspondence: the reading must
account for each linguistic component in the text. Whenever a reading arbitrarily
ignores linguistic components or inadequately accounts for them, the reading may
be presumed improbable. The third criterion is that of generic appropriateness: if
the text follows the conventions of a scientific essay, for example, it is inappropriate
to construe the kind of allusive meaning found in casual conversation. When these
three preliminary criteria have been satisfied, there remains a fourth criterion which
gives significance to all the rest, the criterion of plausibility or coherence.
It should thus be clear that the types of analyses offered in the remainder

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92 Rhetorical structure analysis

of this study are not random construals of the texts; they are valid attempts
at arriving at an appropriate structure for the text.

4.3 Summary
In this chapter I have presented the basic concepts and tools of rhetorical
structure analysis. In the next chapter, we will see how these elements are
used in the analysis of naturally occurring written English expository texts,
and will determine what relationships can be discerned between the
structural analyses and the patterns of anaphora exhibited.

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5 Anaphora in expository written

English texts

5.1

Introduction

In this chapter I examine the distribution of pronouns and full noun phrases
in some expository written English texts. The structural analysis technique
used will be rhetorical structure analysis.
The anaphoric patterns established in this chapter are presented in the
two modes discussed in Chapter 3. These two modes, it will be recalled, are
the context-determines-use mode and the use-determines-context mode
(see also Chapter 3 for a discussion of these modes). I argued in Chapter 3
that both of these modes are always present for conversationally interacting
parties, although in any particular instance one may be more strongly felt
than the other. The argument for this view runs as follows:
1 Anaphoric form X is the unmarked form for a context like the one the
participant is in now.
2 By using anaphoric form X, then, the participant displays an
understanding that the context is of that sort.
3 If the participant displays an understanding that the context is of that
sort, then the other parties may change their understandings about the
nature of the context to be in accord with the understanding displayed
(cf. McHoul 1982).
I would like to propose now that this same cycle of factors lies behind
anaphora in writing as well. Even though the parties (writer and reader) are
not co-present at either the time of writing or the time of reading and hence
cannot directly participate in such a fluid display of understandings, each
feels the other's presence in a way that strongly influences their behavior
towards the text. That is, for a text to be successful (at least in our
audience-oriented culture), the writer must anticipate the reader's
understanding of the text - a developing understanding (since the reader
cannot have full access to the writer's plans from the outset) - and must

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94 Anaphora in expository written English texts

guide the reader to an understanding of the structure of the text which is in
accord with the writer's understanding of the text. Similarly, the reader
must try to form guesses about the structure of the text as it was intended by
the writer, and must therefore be able to form understandings and then
abandon them when they seem not to fit. In this indirect way, then, the
reader is guided to an interpretation based on what the writer displays, and
the writer displays an understanding based on what s/he wants the reader to
understand (see the work of literary critic Wolfgang Iser (Iser 1975, for
example) for a similar view of the reading process).
It should be kept in mind that, while some of the statements of
distribution sound as if they belong in one mode rather than the other, all of
the patterns are meant to accommodate the cycle of modes described above.
As in Chapter 3, the structural patterns offered are meant to be the basic
patterns, that is, the patterns which will be used when "nothing special" is
being done with the reference. The non-structural factors discussed at the
end of the chapter, on the other hand, enter into the picture when
something besides the signalling of structure is going on. The latter uses of
anaphora are treated as "marked," then, because something extra is being
done.

5.2 Anaphora in some expository written English texts

5.2.1

The written expository data

The texts used in this study are composed in American English.1 The
instances of written expository texts were selected from four separate
sources, in an attempt to have a broad range of expository texts represented.
The variety of sources was of course limited by the nature of the
phenomenon under study; that is, the text-type had to be a reliable source of
multi-paragraph texts containing multiple references to at least one person.
In addition, the text-type had to be essentially expository, rather than, say,
narrative or procedural. The individual examplars of each source were
chosen randomly within these criteria.2
The sources ultimately chosen were the following:3
1 The Los Angeles Times.
2 The University Bulletin, the newsletter of the University of California
system, which contains information about administrators, faculty, and
staff in the UC system.

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Some expository written English texts

95

3 Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, a collection of Freudian biographical

essays on the members of the Bloomsbury group, written by the literary
scholar Leon Edel.
4 People, a weekly magazine containing gossip about famous people.
A few miscellaneous examples from other sources were included in the
study. These sources included The Sun (a San Bernardino county
newspaper), UCItems (the University of California at Irvine newsletter),
the Santa Monica Seascape (local newspaper), Monrovia Today (local
newsletter), and The Insider (newsletter for the political group Common
Cause).
The selection of texts thus gives a balance of journalistic vs. pseudoliterary, written by professionals vs. amateurs, formal vs. informal,
scholarly vs. non-scholarly, informational vs. emotional styles. The texts
provide a rich variety of paragraphing styles, text-structuring patterns,
length,4 and subject-matter.
5.2.2

The patterns

The basic pattern for anaphora in my expository texts can be stated as

follows:
A pronoun is used to refer to a person if there is a previous mention of that person in a
proposition that is active or controlling; otherwise a full NP is used. In other words,
by using a pronoun the writer displays to the reader that the intended referent is in
an active or controlling proposition, whereas by using a full NP the writer indicates
to the reader that the intended referent is outside of these units.s
This formulation of the pattern contains two subparts, each of which will
be explored in detail below. They can be stated as:
1 A pronoun is used to reference a person mentioned in an active or
controlling proposition.
2 All other mentions are done with full NPs.
5.2.3

Pronouns for referents in active or controlling propositions

I have taken the terms active and controlling from Reichman (1981), and
will be using them with essentially their original meaning, though
somewhat modified for my own purposes. I will use the term active to refer
to a proposition in an R-structure (either the adjunct or the nucleus) whose
R-structure partner (the nucleus or the adjunct) is being produced. That is,

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96 Anaphora in expository written English texts

the adjunct of an R-structure is active while its nucleus is being produced;
similarly, the nucleus of an R-structure is active while its adjunct is being
produced.
A proposition controlling while its R-structure partner is active. In the
following diagram, for example, the nucleus of the Issue structure is
controlling while the nucleus of the Conditional structure is active (i.e., its
adjunct is being produced):
Issue
evidence
conditional

The underlying motivation for these basic patterns is almost certainly

reader expectations (or the writer's anticipation of those expectations): the
more likely it is that a proposition containing mention of a referent will be
elaborated in some way, the more that proposition is treated as a source for
pronominal anaphora, hence the more likely it is that the next mention of
the referent will be done with a pronoun (cf. Meyer and Rice 1982). For
example, if one finds a sentence like the following in a text, one can be
almost positive that the next clause will make some mention of the referent:
Elizabeth was a strong ruler:
As the structure gets complex in a direction that suggests no return to the
proposition, then the reader may come to assume that the upcoming clauses
will not contain mentions of the referent, and hence the referent "falls" from
the class of pronominalizable referents.
Reader expectations of this sort are molded by the structure of the text as
the reader perceives it, and not by simple measures of distance or
prominence. It is for this reason that structure plays such an enormous role
in anaphora. But while reader expectations are vague and non-precise
notions, text structure can be made more explicit, and hence structure is the
natural starting-point for any discussion of anaphora.
The claim made here about the basic pattern of pronominalization in
expository written texts is that pronouns are used when their referents are in
propositions which are either active or controlling. The first pattern we shall
look at is the active pattern.
If there is a mention of a person in the nucleus of an R-structure, then a

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Some expository written English texts

97

pronoun can be used in the adjunct of that structure. Examples of this

pattern follow. Propositions are numbered for ease of reference.
(1)
(2)

MacPike will use the second half of her day to complete an

administrative fellows program.
She will work under vice president Gerald Scherba in the areas of
resource allocation and academic personnel. (The Sun, July 1983)
Issue
elaboration

The R-structure used in this passage is an Issue structure: the first

sentence is the nucleus of the structure and the second sentence is an
elaboration adjunct (it provides details for the main claim). There is
mention of MacPike in the nucleus of the structure, and in the elaboration
adjunct she is referred to with a pronoun. In something more resembling
the use-determines-context mode, we could say that the pronoun here
creates an interpretation in which the referent is found in an active
proposition.
Another example of pronominalization of a referent in an active
proposition follows.
(1)

Kenneth Vincent Hollywood, who spent his life opening doors for
filmdom's rich and famous after flopping big in his own stage debut,
has died of cancer.
(2) He would have been 61 years old today. (Los Angeles Times, August 8,
1983)
Issue
background

The R-structure used in this passage is again an Issue structure: the first
sentence is the nucleus (in fact of the whole article) and the second sentence
is a background adjunct (information which helps the reader interpret the
nucleus). A pronoun is used in the adjunct.
This pattern also includes instances in which the referent is mentioned in
the first member of a List structure or a Joint schema - a second mention in
the next member of the List or Joint can be done with a pronoun:
(1)

She was also the uncompromising woman.

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98 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(2)
(3)
(4)

There could be no deviation from her high personal standards.

Lady Ottoline Morrell likened her to a Watts painting,
and she discerned melancholy in her face. (A House of Lions, p. 77)

The second mention of Lady Ottoline in this passage is a next member of a

Joint schema and is done with a pronoun.
The active pattern also holds if the person is mentioned in a pre-posed
adjunct of an R-structure and a subsequent mention of that person occurs in
the nucleus of the R-structure (this pattern covers approximately 8 per cent
of the total number of pronouns in the environment of no interfering
referents). The second mention is done with a pronoun. Examples of this
type of active pattern follow.
(1)
(2)

But as he was approaching 60,

a chance encounter with humanistic psychologist Dr. Carl Rogers
made him think about a change. (Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1983)
Circumstance
circumstance

This example manifests a Circumstance R-structure, in which the first

clause is the adjunct and the second clause is the nucleus. Notice that the
reference in the nucleus is done with a pronoun. Here again, in a more
use-determines-context mode, we could say that the pronoun helps to create
the active R-structure relation between the first mention and the second
mention, inasmuch as it signals to the reader that the referent is to be found
in an active (or controlling) proposition.
Another example of this phenomenon follows.
(1)
(2)

James Sanford was running in a park in the fall of 1981

when he stepped in a hole. (Los Angeles Times, July 19, 1983)
Circumstance
circumstance

<

In spite of the subordinator when appearing before the second clause, it is

the first clause that is the adjunct in this Circumstance structure; the second
clause is the nucleus of the structure. We thus have here a mention in an
adjunct followed by a mention in the nucleus, done with a pronoun.

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Some expository written English texts

99

I have demonstrated here that a referent mentioned in the adjunct of a

simple R-structure can be pronominalized in the nucleus of that Rstructure. The simple active pattern thus appears to be well-motivated and
fully documentable (covering approximately 63 per cent of the pronouns in
the environment of no interfering referents).
It should be noted here that the use of pronouns discussed above could
also have been predicted by theories of distance, in that there tends in these
cases to be a short distance (one or two clauses) between the pronoun and
its most recent antecedent mention. We will see later, however, that while
theories of distance in anaphora seem to account for a large number of the
pronouns used, overall they cannot handle the range of anaphoric patterns
exhibited by expository texts.
The second pattern of pronominalization in the expository texts I
examined is the controlling pattern: in this case, a pronoun is used to refer to
a person mentioned in a proposition that is controlling. Recall that a
proposition is controlling if its R-structure partner is active.
For our purposes here, I will say that a proposition is active only while the
first member of the embedded R-structure is being produced (rather than
during the entire embedded structure); thus, when the embedded partner is
being produced, the previously active proposition becomes controlling.
This pattern does not distinguish between the following two patterns, one
in which the second-level adjunct is a terminal node, the other in which it is
the source of a further embedded structure.
X

Y
Z

Embeddings with the appropriate pattern of references are fairly rare in

my texts, probably because many of the texts are short, and possibly
because the types of people-oriented text I have chosen to look at in this
study display a flatter structure than other types of text. The one example I
have found comes from a longer, non-journalistic text.
(1)

Leonard saw these as a "series of psychological curtains which one

interposed between oneself and the outside world of 'other people.'"

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100 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(2)

It was all part of the process of growing up and also a means of

self-concealment and self-defense.
(3) Particularly valuable in this process was his learning of a peculiar
ecstasy which comes from "feeling the mind work smoothly and
imaginatively upon difficult and complicated problems." (A House of
Lions, p. 25)
The structure of this passage follows.
Issue
background
Issue
elaboration

We have a nucleus, Leonard saw these . . ., which is active while the

nucleus of the embedded realization for the adjunct is being constructed (It
was all a part . . .). When the adjunct of this embedded nucleus is being
constructed, the first nucleus becomes controlling. Notice that the
reference in the embedded adjunct is done with a pronoun, thus supporting
our claim that referents in controlling propositions can be pronominalized.
The controlling pattern also extends to cases in which a referent is
mentioned in a nucleus, with its adjunct realized by an embedded structure,
and the embedded adjunct is done first (with no mention of the referent). If
the subsequent embedded nucleus contains a mention of the referent, then a
pronoun can be used to perform the reference. Here again we have an
instance of a referent in a controlling proposition being the source of a
pronominal reference. An example of the structure for this situation is given
below.
X

sr-o
(1) He prospered.
(2) When Victoria came to the throne
(3) he was living in a comfortable house in or near Tavistock Square. (A
House of Lions, p. 19)

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Some expository written English texts

101

Issue
evidence
Q
Circumstance
circumstance

We find in this passage a claim with an evidence adjunct. The evidence

adjunct itself contains an adjunct and a nucleus, and the adjunct comes
before the nucleus. In this case the Issue nucleus is active while the
Circumstance adjunct is produced, becoming controlling when the
Circumstance nucleus is being constructed. A pronoun is used for the
reference in the Circumstance nucleus.
This pattern differs from the preceding one in the rhetorical status of the
"intervening" material; in one case it is the nucleus of an R-structure, and in
the other it is an adjunct of an R-structure. This difference is almost sure to
have an impact on anaphora, since an adjunct is produced "on behalf" of its
nucleus (and hence does not necessarily introduce the next frame for
discussion), while the nucleus is the core of the structure. The adjunct thus
could be treated as less of an "intrusion" for the purposes of anaphora than
the nucleus of an embedded structure. As we shall see somewhat later, this
difference between adjunct and nucleus does have an influence on some
patterns of anaphora.
Pronominalization is also possible if the nucleus is realized by an
embedded structure. In the following passage, for example, a referent is
mentioned in the nucleus of the embedded structure (i.e. the nucleus of a
Circumstance structure), and a subsequent mention of the referent in the
adjunct of the higher structure (i.e. the adjunct of an Issue structure) is
done with a pronoun.
(1) MacPike joined the Cal State faculty in 1978 as a lecturer
(2) after teaching three years at the University of Hawaii.
(3) She received an appointment as an associate professor in 1981. (The
Sun, July 1983)
Issue
elaboration
Circumstance
@
circumstance
(2)

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102 Anaphora in expository written English texts

The embedded nucleus (MacPike joined . . .) contains a mention of the
referent. The higher adjunct (She received an appointment . . .) also
contains a mention of the referent; this second reference is done with a
pronoun.
The controlling pattern is fairly minor in the texts I examined, covering
only approximately 2 per cent of the pronouns in the environment of no
interfering referents.
In the preceding discussion we have seen that a proposition is treated as
controlling if a physically contiguous R-structure is being developed; now
we will see that a physically distant R-structure can "tie" back to an earlier
proposition and thereby make that proposition controlling. This pattern of
tying to a proposition other than the immediately preceding one is called a
return pop, because the writer is returning to an earlier, superordinate,
node. 6 In my texts, a pattern that is seen frequently is nucleus - adjunct adjunct, where the second adjunct is an adjunct for the nucleus rather than
for the preceding adjunct. A diagram of this type of structure is presented
below, where the adjuncts are numbered in their order of occurrence.
Issue

A return pop can also occur if a list of items is being enumerated and there
is a side adjunct on one of the list members, followed by a return to the List
structure:
List

As we would expect from the formulation of the basic pattern above,

propositions which are put into a controlling state by virtue of a return pop
can be the sources of pronominalization. The use of pronouns in return
pops is quite a delicate matter, however, in that any complication of
structure appears to prevent their appearance in this situation. That is,
whether a return is done with a pronoun or not depends heavily on the
intervening "popped-over" material.
The first pattern of return pop that I have identified can be stated as
follows: a pronoun is used in a return pop if the "popped-over" material
contains mentions of the pronoun's referent. In this case the degree of

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Some expository written English texts

103

structural complexity of the popped-over material can be considered for

now7 somewhat irrelevant. Examples of returns done with pronouns in the
case of same-referent mentions in the popped-over material are given below.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

(5)
(6)
(7)

Bob "Smitty" Smith will be installed as the 1984 president of the

Monrovia Chamber of Commerce at the annual January dinner.
He has been a partner in the Monrovia Travel Agency with Bob
Bennett since 1974,
but after the first year, when Bennett retires, Smith will become the
sole owner.
An 11-year member of the Chamber, Smith serves on the Ambassadors committee, a group which systematically visits the over 600
members of the Chamber in a series of two- or three-day "blitzes."
He has served on the Chamber's Board of Directors for three years,
and he is a member of the public relations committee.
His most recent community involvement has been appointment to the
Centennial Committee. . . . (Monrovia Today, January 1984)

For now we will consider only the italicized reference (His) in this
passage. The structure for the whole text is given below (the position in the
diagram of an adjunct to the right or to the left of a nucleus is unimportant
and usually reflects limitations on space).
Issue
background
background
Joint

background

The nucleus of the passage is the first sentence - that is, the fact of Smith's
installment is the "news" which the article is meant to convey. The next
sentence, represented by a Joint structure, is a background structure on the
nucleus of the passage. The next three propositions (in a List structure) are
another background structure on the main nucleus (hence a return pop, but
not the one we are concerned with now). The proposition containing the
italicized pronoun is a third background adjunct off of the main nucleus,
and is the return pop we want to examine now. In this text we thus have a
nucleus and three adjuncts on that nucleus, each produced after the other.
Notice that the second and third adjuncts are not adjuncts of the first

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104 Anaphora in expository written English texts

adjunct, but tie directly to the nucleus. This is what makes them return
pops.
The third adjunct (the second return pop) contains a reference to Smith
that is done with a pronoun. It is my contention here that the reason for this
pronoun return pop is the fact that the two preceding adjuncts, as well as the
nucleus, contain multiple references to Smith. The pronoun in the third
adjunct thus correlates with the appearance of references in the first and
second adjuncts.
Although from a use-determines-context point of view it would be
tempting to say that the pronoun in this case accomplishes the return pop, I
do not think that such a strong statement is warranted by the data. There are
two reasons for this belief. First, we saw many examples earlier in which
pronouns were used in contexts other than return pops; second, we will see
later on that return pops are often done with full NPs. Pronouns are thus
neither necessary nor sufficient for the achievement of a return pop.
Another example of a pronoun used in the context of a return pop is given
below.
(1)

(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)

Jo Anne Brannen, a six-year employee of Security Pacific Bank, was

presented with the Chamber of Commerce courtesy award by Betty
Sandford, chairman of the public relations committee.
Nominees are suggested by residents or customers.
Mrs. Brannen started as a part-time teller
and now serves as the branch auditor.
If she has a secret to getting along with people,
she believes it is that she has worked with the public all of her life,
and really enjoys people.
She has two children, ages 19 and 17, and five stepchildren, all grown.
(Monrovia Today, January 1984).

The structure of this passage follows.

Issue
background

background

background \ f background

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Some expository written English texts

105

The first sentence represents the nucleus of the passage - Brannen's

receiving the award is the news of this little article. The second sentence
(and second paragraph) is a background structure off of the nucleus. The
third paragraph is a further background structure off of the nucleus, and the
final sentence given is a third background structure. This passage thus has
the basic structure of the preceding passage: a nucleus and three
background adjuncts. The second and third adjuncts are return pops. The
last pop is done with a pronoun.
Again, it is my argument here that a pronoun is used for this particular
return pop because the immediately preceding adjunct, which has been
popped over (as well as the nucleus), contains mentions of the relevant
person. It is this intervening mentioning of the referent that allows the use
of a pronoun in the return.
This first pattern of pronominalization in return pops is the second most
common pattern for pronominalization, covering roughly 23 per cent of the
pronouns counted in the environment of no interfering referents.
The second pattern of pronominalization in return pops can be described
as follows: pronouns can be used in return pops where there is no mention of
the referent in the popped-over adjunct, if very special circumstances hold.
In essence, the popped-over material must be extremely limited in
structure: it must not contain a new Issue structure or any other structure
with its own complex nucleusadjunct structure. The most common type of
intervening material in this case is a single node - for example, a terminal
background node, or a terminal elaboration node - although in a few
instances I found intervening material which contained a few equal-status
terminal nodes (as in a List structure or a Joint structure). Anything of
greater internal complexity "induces" a full NP in the return pop. This
second pattern of pronominalization in return pops is fairly rare, accounting
for only about 3 per cent of the pronouns in the environment of no
interfering referents.
My guess about this restriction on anaphora is that when a complex
adjunct is being developed, the reader may begin to assume that the nucleus
is not going to be returned to, and hence the nucleus loses its potential status
of active for the reader.8 That is, the nucleus becomes, in a sense, closed off
for the reader, so that a return must be done with a full NP. If, on the other
hand, the adjunct is clearly limited in complexity, then there may be fairly
high expectations that the writer will return to the nucleus, and therefore
the referent in the nucleus remains pronominalizable. The nucleus in this
case retains its potential active status even while other propositions are

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106 Anaphora in expository written English texts

being constructed. Here again we see that reader expectations (and writers'
anticipation of those expectations) form the mold for patterns of anaphora.
Examples of pronouns in return pops with no mentions of the referent in
the popped-over adjunct are given below.
(1)

As important in Leonard's rearing as the Old Testament sense of

virtue and goodness were large chunks of diluted Baptist doctrine
imparted by his favorite nurse some years earlier.
(2) The nurse was a Somersetshire woman, with straight-parted black
hair and a smooth, oval farm-girl face.
(3) She read to him in the nursery at Lexham Gardens. . . . (A House of
Lions, p. 22)
The structure of this passage is something like the following:
Issue
background
elaboration

The nucleus of this chunk of text is the first sentence. The second
sentence is a background adjunct off of the nucleus, and the third sentence is
an elaboration off of the nucleus. The third sentence is thus a return pop
which pops over the second sentence. The first adjunct (second sentence)
contains no mentions of Leonard, and yet the return pop can be done with a
pronoun9 because the structure of the first adjunct is so simple - a terminal
background node.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)

Like most hedonists, he preferred to look neither backward nor

forward.
The here and now, the picture in front of him, the woman he was with,
the bird in flight - this was life:
the rest was history.
The future could assuredly take care of itself.
He found himself at one with Proust in the thought that "the only
certainty in life is change." (A House of Lions, p. 28)

The nucleus of this passage is the first sentence, which contains a

reference to Clive Bell. From The here and now to the future could . . . we
have an elaboration adjunct with three equal parts (a Contrast structure:
now vs. past vs. future). The last sentence is a second adjunct on the

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Some expository written English texts

107

nucleus, thus a return pop. This return pop can be done with a pronoun
because of the relatively simple structure of the intervening adjunct;
although it has some internal structure, it does not begin something new (as
would a new Issue structure) and it does not have a complex nucleusadjunct structure.
The structure of the passage follows.
Issue
elaboration

elaboration
Contrast

With this pattern of return pop we are stretching the limits of

distance-based theories of anaphora. Notice that in some of the passages
above there are gaps of two or three clauses between the pronoun and the
most recent mention of the referent. The traditional theory could still
predict pronouns under these conditions, but critically could not distinguish these cases, in which three clauses do not induce the use of full NP,
from cases in which three clauses could - for structural reasons - cause the
writer to use a full NP. Thus, while distance theories could predict the uses
of pronominalization I have presented so far, they could not selectively
predict these cases, as a structure-based theory can. For example, Giv6n
and his colleagues (Givon 1983) in fact predict more pronominalization
than is actually displayed by the expository texts I examined for this study.
I suggested earlier that if a List structure were being created and there
was an adjunct off of one of the members of the list, then a return to the List
structure is done with a pronoun. This pattern holds only if the adjunct is
structurally simple (like the adjuncts in the examples above). Examples of
this pattern are given below.
(1)
(2)

His re-entry into Hollywood came with the movie "Brainstorm,"

but its completion and release has been delayed by the death of co-star
Natalie Wood.
(3) He plays Hugh Hefner of Playboy magazine in Bob Fosse's "Star 80."
(4) It's about Dorothy Stratton, the Playboy Playmate who was killed by
her husband.
(5) He also stars in the movie "Class." {Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1983)

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108 Anaphora in expository written English texts

List
Concession

Issue
background

In this passage we get a list of the movies Robertson starred in after his
temporary exile from Hollywood. Thus, even though the first member of
the list has an adjunct which does not mention Robertson (but its
completion . . .), the next member of the list can contain a pronoun. This
pattern is repeated between the second and third members of the list: the
second member has a background structure off of it that does not mention
Robertson (It's about Dorothy Strut ton . . .), but the third member starts
right up with a pronoun. Notice that in a strictly linear view of this text we
might think that he could be ambiguous in the last sentence, since there is
another male referent in the immediately preceding clause (the husband).
The hierarchical approach, which sees the text as a List structure, makes a
more accurate prediction about pronominalization.
The patterns examined in this section describe the major uses of pronouns
in return pops. In the next section we shall see how full NPs tend to be used
in returns.
5.2.4

Full NPs elsewhere

When the structural relation between two mentions of a referent (or the
propositions containing those mentions) is one other than the relations we
have seen above - that is, other than active, controlling, and certain types of
return pops full NPs are used.
Passages illustrating the use of full NP in relations other than active and
controlling are given below.
Clive looked and thought about pictures through his ambivalence of conformity and
rebellion, often tinged also with unconscious pomposity in his endeavor to be
"serious" seeing what the painter had done in his own effort (like Clive's) to make
something out of the world, to give life some shape other than the patterned shapes
of convention. He had, said Virginia Woolf, an odd gift for making one talk sense.
All Clive's life was a quest for a superior "civilization." Clive needed answers to

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Some expository written English texts

109

questions that occurred neither to Leonard nor Lytton, nor to the Stephen girls,
since they had been bred from the first to possess the answers.
Much of this seems to have been latent in the boy, who in a good-natured way
accepted and rebelled against his mother's religious precepts and his father's
concrete world. And yet he wanted approval. He wanted to be right, gentlemanly,
proper; the improprieties would come later. Virginia, in her continuing remarks
about him, said he had the mind of "a peculiarly prosaic and literal type". . . . (A
House of Lions, p. 31)

In this passage, the first mention of Virginia Woolf is part of a proposition

that provides support for a claim about Clive. In the following sentence we
have another claim about Clive, which thus pops over the proposition
containing reference to Woolf. As we saw in Chapter 3, a return pop closes
off the material over which it has popped; thus, after the pop back to claims
about Clive, the material in which Woolf is mentioned is closed, and hence
certainly not active or controlling. The next mention of her, again in an
evidencing proposition, is done with a full NP, as we would have expected.
Return pops are also done with full NPs if the constraining criteria
described above for pronominalization in return pops are not met. That is,
if there are no mentions of the relevant referent in the popped-over material,
and/or the popped-over material is structurally complex, then the return
pop will contain a full NP reference. Examples illustrating this pattern are
given below.

(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)

He spoke, as all his friends have testified, with two voices.

One was deep and manly;
the other was tiny and a squeak.
One had warm baritone notes filled with emotion;
the other was somehow the piping voice of childhood, perhaps learned
from a bevy of sisters who filled the Strachey home.
It has been said that the entire Strachey family possessed this kind of
squeak.
Leonard Woolf remarked that after being with a Strachey one
somehow went away squeaking a little inside.
However that may be, the two voices of Lytton Strachey were the
voices of the masculinity to which he generally aspired but without
real struggle - and the femininity that was his by virtue of his rearing
and environment. . . . (A House of Lions, p. 34)

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110

Anaphora in expository written English texts

Issue
elaboration
()

elaboration
CD

Issue
background
joint

Issue
evidence

Contrast

Contrast

(t)

(7

I n this passage, t h e complexity of the s t r u c t u r e starting with one was deep

and going to went away squeaking a little inside contra-indicates the use of a
pronoun in the return pop (the proposition containing the italicized full
NP).
Another example of full NP used in a return pop which pops over
structurally complex material follows.
Leonard was a young Spartan in the heart of chaotic London. Behind him were
centuries of persecution, violence, death. No more, I suppose, than the centuries
behind the Irish or the Huguenots - or the Puritans, before these also became
persecutors. Yet with important differences. Leonard's people had a longer history
of dispersal, an ingrained learned toughness, a curious mixture of inferiorities and
stubbornness, pride and consciousness of race and status. They had seemed at first
"outlandish" in England; this was a grave handicap in a society with strong
boundaries, cultivated stratifications. Leonard Woolf's heritage was strong: a
Biblical ethic, a sense of the importance of work, a built-in discipline of strength, of
control. One had to be proof against life insults. For the centuries had piled insults
on the Jews and made them prize tenaciously a heritage of righteousness that is the
world order imposed on chaos by the Old Testament - which itself is a record of
chaos, crime, rapacity, persecution and privilege.
Leonard Woolf combined Old Testament virtues with an ingrained English sense
of "fair play". . . . (A House of Lions, p. 21)
Although it is not altogether clear to which nucleus the last line ties back
(probably either Leonard was a young Spartan or Leonard Woolf's heritage
was strong), it is clear that in any case the material popped-over is
structurally complex, as we have defined that notion here.
We have seen in this discussion that the basic pattern is to use full NPs
when the proposition containing the relevant last mention of a referent is not
in an active or controlling state, or if the criteria for pronominalization in
return pops are not met. Below I present a discussion of full NPs in yet

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Rhetorical structure breaks and anaphora

HI

another structural context: that of indicating breaks in the rhetorical

structure of the text.
5.3

Rhetorical structure breaks and anaphora

We saw in earlier sections that pronouns commonly occur in the following

environments:
1

In the nucleus or adjunct of an R-structure, if the relevant referent is

mentioned in the R-structure partner.
2 In a return pop adjunct, if the adjunct "popped over" (a) contains
mentions of the relevant referent, or (b) is structurally non-complex.
It is clear when one examines expository texts, however, that pronouns are
not used on every occasion in which they are structurally warranted; full
NPs are rampant in such texts. What, then, determines when full NPs will
be used when pronouns would have been structurally possible?
The proposal I would like to offer here suggests that it is another type of
structural property that "induces" the use of full NP in these cases.10 The
structural property at work is one of demarcating new rhetorical units.11
Consider the following short text and its rhetorical structure diagram.
Propositions are numbered to ease the task of following the schema.
(1)

(2)
(3)
(4)

(5)

(6)
(7)

James S. Albertson has been appointed acting' academic vice

president by the Regents following President Saxon's recommendation.
The appointment is effective from March 1 until a permanent
academic vice president is named.
Academic Vice President Donald C. Swain earlier was named
president of the University of Louisville.
Albertson will be responsible for academic planning and program
review, student affairs, financial aid, admissions, student loan
collections, student affirmative action, basic skills, the Education
Abroad Program, library plans and policies and UC Press.
He also is responsible for UC Extension, summer sessions,
instructional media, Continuing Education of the Bar, and liaison
with the Academic Senate, the Student Body Presidents' Council
and the California Postsecondary Education Commission.
Albertson has been special assistant to Swain since 1978.
For four years prior to that he was assistant academic vice president.

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112 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(8) He joined UC in 1973 as director of analytical studies.
(9) Albertson is a graduate in classics at St. Louis University.
(10) He earned his M.A. in philosophy there in 1953
(11) and received the Ph.D. in physics in 1958 at Harvard.
(12) He joined the faculty at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1962
and became chairman of the department before he left in 1968 to join
(13) the faculty of the University of Santa Clara as professor of physics.
He was also academic vice president at Santa Clara. (University
(14) Bulletin, March 23, 1981)
Issue
background
elaboration

background
^
-_^
^background
^ ^
background

I claimed in Chapter 4 that the Issue structure is the dominating (i.e.

topmost) structure in most texts, as it is in this short article. I would like to
propose now that each of the adjuncts of an Issue structure holds the
possibility of being a new rhetorical unit, and that each of these new units
tends to be associated with a full NP, even though by other structural
criteria a pronoun would have been appropriate. Notice that all the
adjunct-initial propositions (propositions 4, 6, and 9) which could have had
a pronoun12 in fact contain full NPs, while the propositions which do not
begin a new Issue adjunct (propositions 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, and 14 - these
continue either List structures or Narrative structures) are done with
pronouns. That is, full NPs (at least in the texts I examined for this study)
appear to be associated with the beginnings of Issue adjuncts, even though
pronouns can also be used in those slots (Clancy 1980; Tomlin,
forthcoming; and Marslen-Wilson et al. 1982 discuss a similar relationship
in narratives between episode-initial slot and use of full NP). 13
This type of pattern strongly represents the use-determines-context
mode: by using a full NP at a particular point in a text, especially if the
referent's identity is easily retrievable from the immediately preceding
material, the writer creates the effect of beginning a new rhetorical unit. It
is thus not merely the case that the context of a new unit induces a writer to
use a full NP; the writer actively creates that new unit through the use of the
anaphoric form.

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Rhetorical structure breaks and anaphora

113

Notice, with this association of new rhetorical unit and full NP, that it
would not be accurate to say that pronouns are used when the referent is
mentioned in the immediately preceding text, and that full NPs are used
when the referent is mentioned further back in the text. In my expository
texts, fully 38 per cent (204/541) of the full NPs had their referents
mentioned in the immediately preceding clause, so it is not simple distance
that triggers the use of one anaphoric device over the other. Rather, it is the
rhetorical organization of that distance that determines whether a pronoun
or a full NP is appropriate. Here we find a clear instance in which the nonselective formulations predicting pronominalization whenever the referential distance is small simply fail to account for a widespread anaphoric
phenomenon.
It should be kept in mind that the pattern in this section is, in a sense,
hierarchically superordinate to the other basic patterns and would, in a
rule-ordered system, have to be ordered before the basic patterns in order to
ensure correct output.
Table 5.1 supports the claim that new rhetorical units are associated with
the use of a full NP. Twenty short expository articles were used as the basis
for the figures. Of all of the new rhetorical units started, 65 per cent (77/118)
contained full NPs, while of the continuing rhetorical units, 10 per cent
(6/59) contained full NPs. Thus, while pronouns and full NPs can appear in
either type of slot, there is a skewing of full NP towards new rhetorical unit,
and of pronoun towards continuing rhetorical unit.
Although rhetorical breaks are often signalled in expository prose by
paragraph breaks, it would not be accurate to say simply that in expository
prose all paragraphs begin with full NPs. One of the propositions containing
a pronoun in the passage above is paragraph-initial, though not rhetorical
unit-initial. Thus, while paragraphs are rhetorical units of a sort, they are
not the major units which influence anaphora; the units which do influence
anaphora are R-structures, most notably the adjuncts off of Issue
structures.
Table 5.1 Anaphoric device and position in rhetorical unit
New rhetorical unit
Full NP

77

Pronoun

41

Total

118

(93%)
(65%)
(44%)
(35%)

Same rhetorical unit

6
53

(7%)
(10%)
(56%)
(90%)

59

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Total
83
94
177

114 Anaphora in expository written English texts

There seem to be, then, two conflicting structural principles at work in
determining anaphora in the expository texts I have looked at: the first says
that under certain specifiable conditions a pronoun is appropriate; and the
second says that if certain other conditions also hold, a full NP can be
appropriate. The result is that neither principle is followed 100 per cent of
the time, but rather each text is some sort of compromise between them.14
Further examples of the association between full NP and unit-initial slot
are given below.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)
(8)

Theodore L. Hullar has been appointed executive vice chancellor at

Riverside, succeeding Carlton R. Bovell.
Bovell announced his resignation to return to full-time duties as a
biology professor and researcher on campus.
Hullar is director of the Agricultural Experiment Station and director
for research at Cornell University.
At Cornell, Hullar established three important programs - the Cornell
Biotechnology Institute and New York State Center for Biotechnology, the Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology, and
the Ecosystems Research Center.
As executive vice chancellor, Hullar is responsible for the administration of faculty and academic policy, involving all colleges, professional
schools and departments.
In addition, he will oversee the Graduate Division and Research, the
library, registrar and admissions, student recruitment, affirmative
action, University Extension and Summer Session.
In the chancellor's absence, Hullar will act as chief executive for the
campus.
Chancellor Tomas Rivera said "Dr. Hullar . . ." {University Bulletin,
January 16-20, 1984)

Issue
background
^background

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Rhetorical structure breaks and anaphora

115

All the new adjuncts are started with full NPs; the one proposition which
does not start a new adjunct but continues List structure (6) is done with a
pronoun (In addition, he will oversee . . .).
There is thus a correlation between non-new units and pronouns, as well
as between new units and full NPs.
Further examples of members of a List structure being referred to with a
pronoun are given below.
(1) Lytton's speech was filled with the rhetoric of the past.
(2) He knew his Rousseau;
(3) he knew his Voltaire;
(4) he even knew his President de Brosses! (A House of Lions, p. 39)

(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)

We see many Vanessas in the portraits that remain of her, especially

those painted by Duncan Grant.
The young face was smooth, with firmly lined brows and liquid
gray-green eyes.
She had sensuous lips.
She rarely used makeup.
Somewhere Virginia speaks of "her passionate mouth."
Her voice was beautifully modulated;
her words were carefully paced. (A House of Lions, p. 78)
Issue
elaboration

List

(1) Hunter does what he can to keep elocution alive.

(2) He spoke continuously for three hours from a platform in Memorial
Park during Claremont's 1979 Fourth of July festivities.
(3) The next year, at the same rostrum, he stretched it out four hours.
(4) The next Fourth of July, on a similar platform half a continent away,
he talked nearly six hours. (Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1983)

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116 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)

Against such formidable appeal, his opponents no doubt were

readying grenades,
but up to Super Tuesday they could throw only marshmallows:
For nearly 17 years he had shaved a year off his actual age . . . ;
in 1961 he had officially shortened his name from Hartpence . . . ;
at 43, he had obtained an appointment to the Naval Reserve. {People,
March 26, 1984)
Issue

elaboration

Concession

List

concession
(2)

In each of these examples, the references within the List structures which
are coreferential with the referent in the nucleus (off of which the List is an
adjunct) are done with pronouns. This distribution supports the hypothesis
that it is new rhetorical units that are started with full NPs. In cases where
no new unit is started, a pronoun is used.
The following passage brings up another principle in choosing a full NP
over a pronoun: the greater the internal structure of the just-created
structure, the more likely we are to find the current proposition done with a
full NP, even if the current proposition is a next member in a List or
Narrative structure. That is, a return to a List structure is more likely to be
done with a full NP if the preceding member of the List has its own adjunct
(that is, a structure of its own) than if the preceding member has no internal
structure.
Compare the List and Narrative structures of the Albertson article
(above) with the List structure in the Glaser article (below): the non-initial
members of those structures in the Albertson text are done with pronouns,
while the non-initial member of the List in the Glaser text is done with a full
NP (proposition 6). The reason for this difference in anaphora, according to
the hypothesis proposed here, is that the members of the List and Narrative

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Rhetorical structure breaks and anaphora

117

structures in the Albertson article have no internal structure - they are all
terminal nodes; the first member of the List in question in the Glaser text,
however, has a background adjunct (giving the names of the laboratories),
and the next member of the List (Glaser will also assist. . .) is done with a
full NP.
Remember that in an earlier section we saw that a return to a List
structure over an adjunct of a preceding member of the List could be done
with a pronoun (for example in the Robertson passage above), so I am not
claiming here that such a move must be done with a full NP; rather, given
this other set of structuring principles which takes into account the internal
articulation (Koffka 1935) of the preceding and current units, it can be
done with a full NP.
(1)

(2)

(3)
(4)
(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

A new position at the University has been filled, involving

responsibility for matters concerning the four Laboratories that UC
manages for the US Department of Energy.
Harold Glaser, a consultant to the US Office of Management and
Budget, will serve in the new position as a special assistant to
President Saxon.
The appointment is another step taken by UC to strengthen its
oversight of the DOE Laboratories.
Glaser will assist Saxon and Vice President William B. Fretter in
fulfilling their oversight responsibility for the four Laboratories.
They are the Laboratory of Biomedical and Environmental Science at
Los Angeles, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National
Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico.
Glaser will also assist the Regent's Committee on Oversight of the
DOE Laboratories and two committees that are advisory to Saxon on
laboratory matters. (The two committees are the Scientific and
Academic Advisory Committee established in 1971 and the recently
authorized Committee on Health, Safety and Environment.)
Glaser's responsibilities will include preparation of background
papers, handling requests for special studies, drafting reports,
developing agendas for meetings of the various committees and
preparing background materials for the meetings.
Until recently Glaser had been director of NASA's Solar Terrestrial
Division, responsible for planning, implementing and managing
most of the US effort in solar terrestrial research.

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118 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(9)
(10)
(11)
(12)

(13)

Earlier he had been in charge of solar physics at NASA.

He has also worked at NSF and the National Bureau of Standards,
and he was detailed to the White House staff in 1971 and 1972.
Glaser also worked in the Office of Naval Research, at the Naval
Research Laboratory, and at the Applied Physics Laboratory of
Johns Hopkins University.
(The UC Regents voted at their June meeting to renew for five years
their contracts with the US Department of Energy to manage the
four DOE Labs. The vote was 11-4.) (University Bulletin, July 13,
1981)
Issue
background

background

In the preceding discussion we have seen that full NPs can, and very often
do, occur in structural environments in which pronouns would have been
predicted to occur. I claimed that the motivation for the use of full NPs in
these situations is rhetorical organization, whereby the internal cohesiveness and the external discohesiveness of rhetorical units is displayed to the
reader. Notions of participant continuity and paragraphing were shown to
be ineffective in accounting for the rich patterning of anaphora in these
texts.

5.4 Anaphora in the environment of different-gender referents

In this section I examine the effect on anaphoric patterning of the
appearance of different-gender referents.
The pattern for anaphora in the environment of different-gender
referents is somewhat more restricted than the basic pattern described in
section 5.2. It can be stated in essence as:
A pronoun is used to refer to a person in a different-gender environment if there is a

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Different-gender referents

119

previous mention of that person in a proposition which is active; otherwise a full NP

is used.
As this pattern is stated, then, pronominalization is limited to the active
pattern, which includes R-structure partners and return pops.
5.4.1

Pronominalization in the active pattern

As we saw above, a proposition is active if its R-structure partner is being

produced. In the following passages, we have examples of two differentgender referents in the same proposition, and one or both of them are
pronominalized in the R-structure partner:
(1)
(2)

This time he married a sturdy Scotswoman with all the hardihood and
endurance of the north - and of her race.
Year after year she bore him children. (A House of Lions, p. 35)
Issue
elaboration

Here, both people mentioned in the nucleus of the Restructure are referred
to with pronouns in the R-structure partner (the adjunct).
A similar example follows, in which two referents, of different genders,
appear in the nucleus of the R-structure, and both are pronominalized in the
adjunct.
(1)
(2)

At three Vanessa had a baby brother aged one and a half.

She mothered him. (A House of Lions, p. 79)
Issue
background

If the nucleus is realized by an embedded R-structure, and one of the

referents is mentioned in the nucleus of that embedded structure and the
other, different-gender, referent is mentioned in the adjunct of the
embedded structure, then either person can be referred to using a pronoun
in the higher adjunct. An example of this pattern follows.
(1)

"The most ridiculous boy," said Lady Strachey

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120 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(2)
(3)

when Lytton reached the age of speech,

for he spoke his fantasies aloud. (A House of Lions, p. 35)
Reason
reason
Circumstance

In this passage, the higher nucleus is realized by an embedded

Circumstance structure: the female referent appears in the nucleus of this
embedded structure and the male referent appears in the adjunct of the
embedded structure. Notice that the reference to the male person in the
higher adjunct is done with a pronoun. The active pattern covers
approximately 46 per cent of the pronouns in the environment of
different-gender referents.
When a proposition is returned to via a return pop, it becomes active
again. And, in fact, we saw earlier in this chapter that return pops to a
nucleus are done with pronouns if the adjunct "popped over" is structurally
simple. Below I will demonstrate that, following this pattern, a return pop is
done with a pronoun even if the popped-over adjunct mentions a
different-gender referent, if and only if that adjunct is structurally simple.
Examples follow.
(1)
(2)

His re-entry into Hollywood came with the movie "Brainstorm,"

but its completion and release has been delayed by the death of co-star
Natalie Wood.
(3) He plays Hugh Hefner of Playboy magazine in Bob Fosse's "Star 80. "
(4) It's about Dorothy Stratton, the Playboy Playmate who was killed by
her husband.
(5) He also stars in the movie "Class." {Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1983)
The structure of this passage can be represented as:
List

T
Concession

Issue
background

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Different-gender referents

121

In each instance in which I have italicized the pronoun (propositions 3

and 5), we have a return pop to a list structure over a non-complex adjunct
containing a reference to a different-gender person.
Another example follows.
(1)
(2)
(3)

Alexis C. Jackson has been appointed assistant vice president for

business management at the University.
The appointment, recommended by President Saxon, was approved
by the Regents at their March meeting.
The appointment was to be effective April 1 or as soon thereafter as she
has been able to relocate to California. (University Bulletin, April 20,
1981)
Issue
elaboration

elaboration

In this passage, we have a nucleus (Alexis . . . has been appointed . . .),

then an elaboration adjunct with a male referent mentioned in it, and then a
return pop over the adjunct to create a second elaboration adjunct. The
return is done with a pronoun, even though a different-gender referent is
present in the popped-over adjunct. The return pop pattern accounts for
roughly 50 per cent of the pronouns in the environment of different-gender
referents.
In all of my texts I found one passage in which pronominalization was
possible in a different-gender environment when the relevant proposition
was controlling rather than active. This passage is given below.
(1) He prospered.
(2) When Victoria came to the throne,
(3) he was living in a comfortable house. (A House of Lions, p. 19)
Issue
evidence
0)
circumstance

It is worth noting about this passage that the "interfering" differentgender referent comes in the adjunct, rather than the nucleus, of the
embedded structure, and in addition the adjunct itself is structurally simple
(a terminal node). Both of these factors no doubt work together to allow

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122 Anaphora in expository written English texts

pronominalization in a situation other than the active pattern established
above.
5.4.2

Full NPs elsewhere

Full NPs are used in cases where anything more "distant" than the active
pattern is in progress, and in return pops if the popped-over material is
structurally complex.
Passages illustrating the use of full NP in a pattern other than the active
pattern are presented below.
(1)

(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)

Leonard got from her both the pleasures and fear of public events, "the
horrors and iniquities of the great world of society and politics as
recorded in the Baptist Times, about the year 1885."
And all this in the untroubled atmosphere of the Lexham Gardens
third-floor nursery, where the boy felt snug and safe.
The fire blazed behind the tall guard;
the kettle sang musically,
and the music mingled with the nurse's reading of serious things. (A
House of Lions, p. 22)
Issue
background
Q
Issue
elaboration
List

The higher nucleus mentions both the referents - Leonard and his nurse.
We then have an adjunct/nucleus which mentions only Leonard, and the
adjunct on this last item - a List structure - contains a reference to the
nurse, done with a full NP. We thus have a controlling pattern, and a full
NP is used for the critical reference.
Another example follows.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

Still later she had John Singer Sargeant as her master;

like Furse, he had studied in France.
He was a sympathetic and encouraging teacher, a large imposing
presence.
Vanessa liked his voice. (A House of Lions, p. 83)

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Same-gender referents

123

Issue
elaboration
Issue
background

Issue
background

Here again we have a controlling pattern, with a different-gender referent

in the embedded nucleus, and a full NP used for the reference in the
embedded adjunct.
It was claimed in section 5.2.3 that return pops over structurally complex
material are associated with the use of full NP, even if no other referents are
involved. The presence of different-gender referents does not alter the
pattern: it is followed if the popped-over material contains mentions of a
different-gender referent as well. However, since the pattern is basically the
same as the one illustrated in section 5.2.3,1 will not discuss it further here.
In this section we have seen, again, that it is not just distance or the
introduction of another referent that determines the anaphoric device
chosen; rather, it is the structural organization of that distance, and of that
other mention, that determines anaphoric patterning. Clearly, then, we
need to have a view of text as hierarchically organized if we are to
understand anaphora.

5.5 Anaphora in the environment of same-gender referents

We will see in this discussion, as in the preceding section, that simple
introduction of another referent does not necessarily produce "ambiguity";
rather, it is the structural organization of the text that determines what will
count as "interfering" and what not.
The pattern of anaphora for same-gender environments is close to the
pattern for different-gender environments, with a few more restrictions that
will be discussed in detail below:
A pronoun is used in a same-gender environment if the relevant proposition is in an
active state. Otherwise, a full NP is used.
As this formulation stands, the same-gender environment seems identical to
the different-gender environment; however, as will be shown below, there
are a few differences.

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124 Anaphora in expository written English texts

5.5.1

Pronominalization in the active pattern

As before, included under the active pattern are basically (1) propositions
whose R-structure partners are being developed, and (2) propositions that
are being tied to by a return pop. I examine the first of these below.
Pronominalization is possible in an R-structure partner if two samegender referents are mentioned in the same proposition under the following
conditions:
(a)

(b)

if the referent mentioned in the second proposition was the

grammatical subject of the first proposition (or the possessor in a
nominalization); or
if the referent mentioned in the second proposition was not the
grammatical subject of the first proposition, but is mentioned in the
next highest nucleus.

Examples illustrating the first pattern (subject > pronoun) are given below.
(Examples are from A House of Lions unless otherwise indicated.)
This is not to say that Virginia's rivalry with Vanessa had diminished. She oscillated
between abasement and respect.
Old Leslie Stephen sat now in Thoby's rooms in the Trinity Great Court. One by
one the young tried to talk to him.
Lytton could hardly undertake the entire history of Warren Hastings. He would
focus on
Quentin Bell has pointed to an interesting slip of the pen Virginia made in a letter to
her friend Violet Dickinson. She begins by saying
Clive asked Lytton to join the luncheon party. He was a little put out to learn that
Lytton had already met Desmond
While FitzGerald doesn't have a quarrel with this year's grand marshal, union leader
Teddy Gleason, he is annoyed by the selection of IRA fugitive Michael O'Rourke as
honorary grand marshal. (People, March 19, 1984)
Examples illustrating the second pattern follow.
Desmond once remarked that Lytton's friendships at Cambridge were more like
loves. One thinks of him as taking possession
Desmond gave him the Oxford miniature Shakespeare and four volumes of Milton,
so that he would carry into remote parts the immortal utterances of the English
tongue.
There are also situations in which both same-gender referents can be
referred to with pronouns.15 This anaphoric pattern arises only when role

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Same-gender referents

125

continuity of subject is maintained; that is, the pronoun which is the subject
of the clause in question must be coreferential with the subject of the clause
of the R-structure partner. From a use-determines-context viewpoint, we
could say that the writer signals to the reader, with the use of two pronouns,
that these pronouns should be interpreted as maintaining the grammatical
roles of the active proposition.
Examples of this pattern are given below.
Lytton had written an earlier essay on Hastings. He had seen him as a "superman"
In the phantasmagoria of her inner world, Virginia loved Vanessa. She wanted total
possession of her.
The active pattern covers about 82 per cent of the pronouns in the
environment of same-gender referents.
Another organization in which pronouns can be used in a same-gender
environment is the List return pop. In this situation, two mentions of the
same person, X, can be separated by references to another, same-gender,
person, Y, and the second mention of person X can be done with a pronoun
if and only if the second mention of X is a return pop to another member of a
List structure (or a proposition containing a mention of X) and the
popped-over adjunct is (a) also a member of the List structure and (b)
structurally simple. Schematically, this pattern would appear thus:
Issue
X

List
X

X (pronoun)

Notice that the restrictions on pronominalization in return pops are

somewhat greater for same-gender environments than for different-gender
environments: for the latter, pronominalization in return pops is not
confined to Lists. This greater restrictedness on pronominalization seems
intuitively reasonable, given the greater competition among same-gender
referents for a gender-marked pronoun. This pattern covers about 12 per
cent of the pronouns in the environment of same-gender referents.
Examples of the pattern of pronominalization in List return pops, with
their diagrams, are given below.
(1)

We see many Vanessas in the portraits that remain of her, especially

those painted by Duncan Grant.

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126 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(2)

The young face was smooth, with firmly lined brows and liquid
gray-green eyes.
(3) She had sensuous lips.
(4) She rarely used makeup.
(5) Somewhere Virginia speaks of "her passionate mouth."
(6) Her voice was beautifully modulated;
(7) her words were carefully paced. (A House of Lions, p. 78)

Issue
elaboration
u)

List

In this case the proposition containing the italicized pronoun is not an

adjunct of the immediately preceding proposition (somewhere Virginia
speaks . . .) but is another in a series of adjuncts (in a List structure) on the
first line (We see many Vanessas . . .). The return with a pronoun is
possible in spite of the presence of a same-gender referent, according to the
hypothesis proposed here, because the relevant mention of Vanessa comes
in a next member of a list, popping over the previous member of the list to
the proposition We see many Vanessas . . . ; in addition the popped-over
list member is structurally simple.
The next example comes from later in the same list.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)

(9)

We see many Vanessas in the portraits that remain of her, especially

those painted by Duncan Grant.
The young face was smooth, with firmly lined brows and liquid
gray-green eyes.
She had sensuous lips.
She rarely used makeup.
Somewhere Virginia speaks of "her passionate mouth."
Her voice was beautifully modulated;
her words were carefully paced.
Virginia, so often her historian, likens her to a bowl of golden water
which brims but never overflows - or, as we have seen, to the sedate
volcano.
In another image she has a "queer antique simplicity of surface."

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Same-gender referents

127

Here again we have a return in a List structure at proposition 9 done with

a pronoun, in spite of an apparently "interfering" same-gender referent
(which appears in proposition 8).
Another example is given below.
(1)

He [i.e. Leonard] saw with child-like wonder and horror a brawling

London whose violence and ginmill sordidness were visible at all
times.
(2) At night he heard a woman's shrieks;
(3) or he saw a drunken, tattered man staggering about with a policeman
violently hitting him;
(4) he also glimpsed inferno-slums filled with strange human shapes. (A
House of Lions, p. 23)

In this passage, although two other same-gender referents are mentioned

in proposition 3, Leonard is pronominalized in proposition 4, and this fact
correlates with the fact that proposition 4 is another member of a List
structure.
It is interesting to note that, from the reader's perspective, this pattern is
possible only if the reader maintains some expectation that the nucleus will
soon be returned to when s/he encounters one member of the List with a
same-gender referent. It is probably the case that as this List member grows
in complexity, the expectation of immediate return diminishes; hence the
writer risks a possible misinterpretation if a pronoun is used for a return
after a structurally complex adjunct.
In this preceding section I have demonstrated that pronouns can be used
even when other referents of the same gender are present if certain
structural conditions hold. It is thus not the case that the simple presence of

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128 Anaphora in expository written English texts

another, same-gender, referent in the neighboring clauses automatically
induces the use of a full NP; rather, there is a delicate interaction between
the presence of same-gender referents and the hierarchic structure of the
text, and it is this interaction which determines when a pronoun can be used
(and hence which determines what is to count as semantically "ambiguous"). It is critical, then, that a hierarchic approach to anaphora be
adopted.
5.5.2

Full NP elsewhere

Full NPs are used whenever the circumstances described above are not met.
Some of the cases in which the circumstances are not met are described
below.
If two same-gender referents are mentioned in a proposition and one of
them is mentioned in that proposition's R-structure partner, then a full NP
will be used for the reference in the second proposition if the referent did not
fill the subject role in the first proposition and was also not mentioned in the
next highest nucleus. Examples illustrating this pattern appear below.
But Lytton could not control Clive's appetite for life. Clive was a hungry-forexperience heterosexual. (A House of Lions, p. 45)
It's not for nothing that Kennedy hagiographer Theodore Sorenson is a co-chairman
of Hart's campaign. As Hart's caravan sped onward . . . (People, March 26, 1984)
Keynes . . . could outplay Lytton. All Lytton could do was (A House of Lions,
p. 119)
She had lied to keep shock and suffering from her [Violet]. But Violet, 18 years
older, needed no such defence. (A House of Lions, p. 136)
Furthermore, if the following situation holds, in which a referent (and only
that referent) is mentioned in an R-structure and then another, samegender, referent is mentioned in the R-structure partner, then a full NP is
used for the reference in the second proposition, regardless of that referent's
status in higher R-structures. In this case, since the referent in the first
proposition is in the active pattern, a pronoun would be heard as referring to
it, rather than to the referent currently being mentioned in the second
proposition (even if the latter is mentioned only two clauses back).
Examples of this phenomenon follow.
Elvis had his gilded belt, Elton his spectacular spectacles and now Michael Jackson
has that glittering glove. Rhinestones a-twinkling, the glove lends its wearer a
magical air - as if he could pluck a rabbit from a hat with the same ridiculous ease

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Same-gender referents

129

that he snatched an unprecedented eight Grammy awards a couple of weeks

back. . . . [most of two paragraphs omitted]
Whitten says that Jackson owns six of the gloves, including two that are black and
one that is red, white and blue.
Though Michael is mum about explaining why he wears the glove, other than to
say it makes him feel "never offstage," Whitten maintains it is an integral part of the
25-year-old singer's mystique. (People, March 19, 1984)
In this passage, Whitten is referred to with a full NP because of the
same-gender referent in the R-structure partner (Michael, in the pre-posed
adjunct).
Another example follows.
(1)
(2)

(3)

Virginia's characterizations were a matter of moods.

Sometimes Vanessa was "marmoreally chaste" - loaded words
suggesting coldness, concreteness, smoothness of surface, virginal
severity.
Vanessa has "a genius for stating unpleasant truths in her matter of
fact voice." (A House of Lions, p. 79)
Issue
evidence
List

This passage is particularly interesting in that it shows what happens

when two propositions (in a List structure) are adjuncts to a same-gender
nucleus. In each case, Vanessa is referred to with a full NP because
Virginia, rather than Vanessa, appears in the nucleus, and each List
member in a sense cycles back to that nucleus. The proposition containing
the mention of Virginia is thus active, and so is the source of referents for
pronominalization. This passage is thus the exact inverse of the passage
given below, in which all of the List members are done with pronouns
because their referent (Vanessa) appears in the relevant nucleus (and is,
therefore, in the active pattern):
(1)

We see many Vanessas in the portraits that remain of her, especially

those painted by Duncan Grant.
(2) The young face was smooth, with firmly lined brows and liquid
gray-green eyes.
(3) She had sensuous lips.

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130 Anaphora in expository written English texts

(4) She rarely used makeup.
(5) Somewhere Virginia speaks of "her passionate mouth."
(6) Her voice was beautifully modulated;
(7) her words were carefully paced. (A House of Lions, p. 78)
It is an interesting fact about the distribution of anaphora in same-gender
environments that a List return over a same-gender referent can be done
with a pronoun, while a same-R-structure reference must be done with a full
NP. That is, in the following structure a pronoun can be used,
X
Ref. 1

List

Ref. 2

Pronoun 1

while in this structure a full NP must be used:

X
Full NP 1
How can we account for this apparently anomalous distribution? My guess
is that the List structure sets up such strong expectations that another
mention of the referent is coming up that even an intervening same-gender
referent does not displace the first referent from its pronominalizable
position. In any other situation (at least for the type of text I examined), the
expectations of a next reference are not strong enough to guarantee an
accurate resolution of a pronoun, so writers avoid pronouns in such
situations.
While considering the cognitive side of this difference, we should not
ignore the very real - and possibly non-functionally based - influence of
genre on anaphoric patterning. The observed difference between samegender anaphora in Lists and in other structures may have more to do with
the somewhat arbitrary conventions of the expository, people-oriented texts
that I have used in this study than with the cognitive processes of the reader
(or the writer's assumptions about those processes). As we will see in
Chapter 6, the patterns of anaphora exhibited by expository texts are very
much more conservative than would be indicated by cognitive processes (if
the latter can be inferred from the spontaneous conversations examined in
Chapter 3); the expository situation may thus have its sources in something

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Same-gender referents

131

as mundane (for linguists) as generic conventions (whose own sources are

unknown).
Return pops other than in List structures provide another same-gender
context in which full NPs are used. An example of this pattern is presented
below.
(1)

Theodore L. Hullar has been appointed executive vice chancellor at

Riverside, succeeding Carlton R. Bovell.
(2) Bovell announced his resignation to return to full-time duties as a
biology professor and researcher on campus.
(3) Hullar is director of the Agricultural Experiment Station and director
for research at Cornell University. (University Bulletin, January 16,
1984)
Issue
elaboration

background

The return at proposition 3 pops over the mention of a same-gender

referent in proposition 2, but proposition 3 does not pop back to an ongoing
List structure; the return pop is done with a full NP.
5.5.3

Interim summary

In this section we have examined the ways in which other referents influence
patterns of anaphora. The basic pattern for other-referent environments
appears to be more restricted than the pattern for environments without
other "interfering" referents in that only the active pattern seems to hold:
that is, referents in propositions whose R-structure partner is being
developed are available for pronominalization - any relationship more
embedded than that induces the use of a full NP.
It is important to reiterate that the mere presence of another referent whether same-gender or different-gender - is not the issue here; the crucial
factors for anaphora have to do with the structural patterning of the clauses
(and also in some cases the grammatical roles of the NPs in question). This
critical feature of anaphora accounts for the lack of success some researchers
have experienced in quantifying referent ambiguity and its effect on
anaphora (see Givon 1983). Before we begin quantifying ambiguity, we
need to explore qualitatively, as I have tried to do here, the structural factors
that influence anaphoric patterning.

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132 Anaphora in expository written English texts

5.6 Non-structural factors

In the preceding sections I have tried to describe the patterns of anaphora in
my texts that appear to have a structural basis; that is, it is the rhetorical
relation of the propositions that in these instances determines what
anaphoric device will be used. In this section I will present some patterns
that reflect non-structural (i.e. not related to rhetorical structures) bases.
5.6.1

Further description with a full NP

As Schegloff (p. c) has pointed out, any next reference to a person is a place
where further information about that person can be added. In my
expository texts, this fact is often realized through the use of a full NP complete with modifiers- in situations in which a pronoun would have been
possible according to the structural patterns presented earlier. This
technique is especially widely used in short articles, in which space is at a
premium, and therefore any piece of information that can be packaged in a
modifier or relative clause (instead of a full sentence) will appear in this
"condensed" form, as part of a full NP (Dillon 1981, suggests that this
strategy is used to "add more information about the thing, semicovertly, as
it were" (p. 99)). Examples of this phenomenon follow.
There was one whose passion for literature was imparted to the small boy. Mr. Floyd
made Leonard "dimly aware that lessons - things of the mind - could be exciting and
even amusing." (A House of Lions, p. 23)
Here the full NP is used to introduce a previously unknown name for a
character that was already introduced (one). I do not mean to claim that this
is the only reason that a full NP is used here - the structural principle
discussed in section 5.3 on demarcating rhetorical units may also be
involved; I mean to suggest only that at least part of the motivation for using
a proper noun in this passage may be what I have called the "further
information" function of full NPs.
He was rescued Sunday after crawling to the top of the ravine, where he collapsed
and was spotted by hikers.
"They told me their names," he said. "I forgot them, but I'll never forget their
faces."
The lance corporal was on leave from his job as a small-arms repairman at Camp
Pendleton. (Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1983)
Before this passage, we did not know that Bell was a lance corporal, a fact
that may be significant in judging how well he performed under the stressful

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Non-structural factors

133

conditions of his accident. This information is brought in not through a

complete clause, but through an anaphoric device - a full NP.
George R. Tilton, professor of geological sciences who trained as a chemist, applies
chemical theories and analytical methods to geological problems. These problems
concern especially the age, origin and evolution of the earth, the moon and the solar
system.
Tilton, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is regarded as a leader in
lead isotope geochemistry. (University Bulletin, December 1, 1980)
Bell, once a restaurant worker in his hometown of Battle Creek, Mich., said, "I
thought about all the food."
Bell, who has taken mountain survival training with the Marines, said he will
continue to enjoy the woods. (Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1983)

In these passages again, full NPs are used in conjunction with reduced
pieces of added information (non-restrictive relative clauses). The slots
could have been filled with a pronoun (by the rules of return pop for the
environment of no "interfering" referents) or with full NPs (by the rules of
rhetorical unit demarcation); but we can say again that at least part of the
reason for using a full NP in these cases is the fact that "piggyback"
information is being brought in here in the form of relative clauses, and a
full NP is required for the syntactic environment Referent + relative clause.

5.6.2

Classification

Another communicative situation in which a full NP can be used in the place

of an expected pronoun is when the membership of the referent in a category
is the facet of the referent being stressed. For example, in positions where
one could have expected a pronoun, one finds the young girl, the Swede, etc.
Illustrations of this pattern are given below.
Leonard Woolf sat for the scholarship examination at Trinity College - the college of
Isaac Newton - in Cambridge in March 1899, when he was almost nineteen. He was
adept at passing exams. In October of that year, when the century had reached an
extremity of old age, the right-thinking and stoical-skeptical young Jew went up to
the university. (A House of Lions, p. 26)
Clive goes on to tell us in this passage (which we can read only as autobiography, so
closely does it fit what we know): "He had learnt to feel; and because, to feel, a man
must live, it was good to be alive. I know an erudite and intelligent man, a man
whose arid life had been little better than one long cold in the head, for whom the
madman, Van Gogh, did nothing less." This his closest friends apparently did not
grasp. The vain little "name dropper" Clive Bell had had a revelation. (A House of
Lions, p. 32)

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134 Anaphora in expository written English texts

He saw with childlike wonder and horror a brawling London whose violence and
ginmill sordidness were visible at all times. At night he heard a woman's shrieks; or
he saw a drunken, tattered man staggering about with a policeman violently hitting
him; he also glimpsed inferno-slums filled with strange human shapes. They made
the small boy sick with terror. (A House of Lions, pp. 22-3)

In all of these passages, full NPs are used to categorize the referents,
rather than just establish the referent's identity for the reader.
The difference between this pattern and the previous non-structural
pattern lies in the newness of the information conveyed by the modification:
in the first pattern ("further information"), the reader is given, in a densely
packaged form, new information about the referent; in the second pattern
("classification"), already-known information is used to bring out the
membership-in-a-category facet of the referent's identity. For example, we
knew before reading the passages given above that Leonard was a "young
Jew" and that Clive Bell tended to be thought of as a name-dropper, and that
the person in London (Leonard Woolf) was a young boy.
It is a curious fact about this particular pattern of anaphora that it tends to
occur mainly in literary texts (while the "further information" pattern
occurs in all text-types, although concentrated in short articles). Perhaps
the use of this device, since it does little in the way of hard-core information
conveying, carries a flavor of flowery variation that is more typical of literary
texts than, say, short articles in a university bulletin.

5.6.3

Comparison and contrast

It is very often the case that a reference will be done with a full NP if the
referent is being contrasted or compared, either implicitly or explicitly,
with other people. Examples from A House of Lions are given below.
He [Leonard] also describes how he learned to be the kind of "I" who watches
himself as if he were double - "not I." This kind of self-awareness has been sketched
by many others, not least Emerson and William James in their "me" and "not me." In
Leonard it seemed as if he were both actor and observer: "I cannot avoid continually
watching myself playing a part on the stage." (p. 24)
His [Clive's] laughter was an explosive spasm or guffaw, and in his youth he
possessed distinct crudities that made him seem like some young rural squire out of
Fielding rather than a sensitive poetry-conscious undergraduate at an ancient
college. Leonard Woolf's early environment had been that of a middle-class
intellectual and of a city-bred boy. Arthur Clive Heward Bell's was middle-class
hunting and fishing, (p. 27)

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Summary

135

School for Lytton was erratic as well as erotic: his mother worried about his health;
she was determined to ease his life. Unlike Leonard, unlike Clive, who were hearty,
healthy boys, who loved games and learned their Latin and Greek well, and were
heterosexuals, Lytton was not subjected to formal public schools, (p. 37)
At the end of his [Maynard Keynes's] time at Eton, he lived in the school as if it were
his own fine country house and cooperated with his friends in running it. Unlike
Leonard, Clive and Lytton, sons of suburb, countryside, metropolis, John
Maynard Keynes was "all" Cambridge, (p. 48)
The claim being made here is that the use of the (italicized) full NP in each
passage is motivated, at least in part, by the comparative or contrastive
nature of its proposition. I do not mean to imply that this is the only
motivation for using a full NP in all of thf se cases (for example, the last
passage is also an illustration of "further information," since it offers the first
use of the name of the person under discussion); but the comparative/
contrastive aspect needs to be taken into account if we are to explain the full
range of anaphoric patterning in expository texts.
In the preceding sections I have presented some types of non-structureoriented communicative functions which seem to favor the use of full NP. 16
The underlying proposal of this presentation has been that, while hierarchic
structure relations are crucial in the patterning of anaphora in written
English texts, they are not responsible for every use of all the anaphoric
devices that are available to us in English; some of these uses have other
communicative functions as their source. These non-structural uses of
various anaphoric devices have been ignored in recent discourse analysis,
especially with regard to written material, so it is important that they be
recognized in a full treatment of anaphora.

5.7

Summary

In this chapter I have identified and described various patterns of anaphora

in written expository English. It was claimed that the most basic pattern is
the active pattern, since it holds for different-gender and same-gender
environments, as well as for environments with no "interfering" referents.
The other, somewhat less common, pattern is the controlling pattern, and
this holds only for environments with no interfering referents.
In order to understand the few instances of semi-long-distance pronominalization in the texts, I identified a structural organization called return
pop. With a return pop the writer returns, not to the immediately preceding
proposition but to another, usually superordinate, proposition. I proposed

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136 Anaphora in expository written English texts

that under certain circumstances return pops can be done with pronouns;
these circumstances have to do with the structure of the "popped-over"
material, the content of that material, and whether there are other referents
present.
It was also demonstrated that there is another set of organizing principles
which can cause a full NP to be used where, according to the basic patterns
of anaphora described, a pronoun would have been appropriate. These
principles were shown to involve the demarcation of rhetorical units, such
that a full NP is used at the beginning of a new rhetorical unit (otherwise a
pronoun is used).
Finally, I tried to indicate that anaphora is not governed entirely by
rhetorical organization - that there are non-structural factors which
influence the choice of anaphoric device. These factors include categorization of the referent, further information about the referent, and comparison
and contrast of the referent with other people.

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6 Anaphora in expository written

and conversational English

6.1

Introduction

In the preceding chapters I have explored the distribution of pronouns and

full NPs in written (expository) and conversational (non-narrative)
English. In this chapter I present a comparison of the anaphoric patterns
found in the conversational and written texts, including same- and
different-gender environments. Before beginning the presentation, however, a note about past research on the differences between spoken and
written language is in order.1
6.2 Theories of the differences between spoken and written
language
A fair amount of attention has been directed recently to the differences in
syntactic structure exhibited by the two modalities (see, for example, Keenan
and Bennett 1977; Ochs 197%; Chafe 1982; Biber 1983; Akinnaso 1982;
O'Donnell 1974; Tannen 1982; Rubin 1980). Claims have been made that
written texts tend to be characterized by greater complexity of syntactic
structure (greater use of nominalizations and complex verb structures, for
example), more frequent use of subordination, and a predominance of
subject-predicate structure rather than topic-comment (or referenceproposition) ; that is, in general there seems to be a greater degree of what
Chafe (1982) calls syntactic integration in written texts than in spoken texts.
It should be noted at this point that the characteristics of spoken and
written language that have been studied are surface phenomena that can be
counted, and from which contrastive frequencies can be given. In this case,
where absolute frequency is the distinguishing factor, the exact nature of
the texts is critical: the length of the text, its level of formality, its genre, the
social class of its creator, etc., can all critically influence the number of times
a particular syntactic construction gets used. In the present study, on the

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138 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English

other hand, I have examined recurrent underlying patterns of rhetorical/
interactional structure within each mode, and have isolated correlations
between these recurrent structural patterns and recurrent anaphoric
patterns. These structural patterns appear regardless of such factors as
length of text, level of formality, or social class of author/speaker (although
they may be more frequent in one particular subtype of the genre), and the
correlations with linguistic coding recur. Within this paradigm, it is thus
possible to make justifiable claims about the differences between certain
written and certain "spoken" texts without exploring the variables
mentioned above. For me, then, the method adopted in this work proves to
be much more satisfactory than the surface phenomenon approach taken by
previous studies.2
In order to draw interesting conclusions about the difference in anaphoric
patterning across the modes, it is essential that the text-types chosen to
represent each mode be comparable. In the recent literature on written and
spoken language, various suggestions have been made for determining what
constitutes comparable texts across the written-spoken division. One
suggestion (see Akinnaso 1982) states that the texts must be identical in all
respects except whether they are produced by the mouth or the pen; that is,
to be comparable, two texts must be produced by the same person, exhibit
the same degree of planning, exhibit the same degree of formality, exhibit
the same degree of interactiveness (i.e., both must be monologue or both
must be dialogue), and be of the same genre (story or essay, for example).
This suggestion suffers from several problems: it renders naturally
occurring data virtually useless, since any two such natural texts will differ
on more points than the instrument with which they were produced; it sees
texts as reducible to a set of controllable variables, and hence oversimplifies
the extremely complex nature of text production and comprehension; and it
presupposes that we want to explain the differences between written and
oral texts using the controllable variables established, and not that we might
first be interested in simply describing the differences.
Another suggestion, which I find more appealing, states that there are
marked and unmarked types of text for each modality, and that we should
compare texts of the same markedness (see Biber 1983). For example,
multi-party spontaneous conversation is the unmarked text-type for oral
production, and expository prose is one of the unmarked text-types for
written (what Biber calls 'literate') production. This way of looking at genre
and modality seems to me to be highly appropriate, since it allows us to

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The basic patterns

139

compare what one typically does when writing with what one typically does
when speaking:
. . . There is no a priori reason why "functionally equivalent" tasks are in fact
"comparable" across the two modes. In a comparison of academic expository prose
and academic lectures, for example, we mightfindfew linguistic differences, and be
tempted to conclude that speech utilizes "literate strategies" and thereby confirm the
view that there are not major differences between speech and writing. But this
conclusion would ignore the fact that lectures, although spoken, are not typical of
the spoken mode. . . . Thus, even though a study of this type would control for
communicative factors, from one perspective it would not be based on comparable
tasks. Rather, it would contrast a typical written task with a highly untypical spoken
task. (Biber 1983: 9)
In light of this discussion, I have chosen to use Biber's notion of
comparability as a basis for choosing "comparable" texts. For the present
study I have selected a large group of expository monologic written texts
from a range of sources which are compared, with respect to anaphora, with
naturally occurring conversations among friends and/or relatives.
We can now turn to a comparison of the anaphoric patterns in the written
and conversational texts.

6.3 The basic patterns

The basic patterns of each mode were described as follows:
For non-story conversation:
The first mention of a referent in a sequence is done with a full NP. After that, by
using a pronoun the speaker displays an understanding that the sequence has not
been closed down.
For expository writing:
A pronoun can be used to refer to a person if there is a previous mention of that
person in a proposition that is active or controlling; otherwise a full NP is used.
We could say for both of these discourse-types that a mention can be done
with a pronoun if the referent is in focus (Grosz 1977), in consciousness
(Chafe 1976; Dillon 1981; Reichman 1981), textually evoked (Prince 1981)
or high in topicality (Givon 1983), where these terms can be operationally
denned in terms of the discourse structure. That is, we could say that a
referent is a topic, or in focus, or in consciousness if it has been mentioned in
a sequence which is open or active or controlling (this is, in essence, how

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140 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English

Grosz and Reichman use the terms they have chosen). This would provide a
clear definition for terms, especially topic and focus, that have otherwise
been tossed about in rather loose ways (see Gundel 1974 for a history of the
term topic, and Prince 1981 for a discussion of the notion of givenness).3 It
should be noted, however, that if these concepts are to be defined according
to discourse structure (as indeed they must be), then we must be aware that
they will mean something different for each discourse-type, since by
convention each discourse-type has "chosen" a different unit within which
these concepts are situated.
The main difference between the patterns for conversation and
expository prose lies in the distinction between the notions closed, on the
one hand, and active or controlling, on the other. In particular, we saw that
there were instances of extremely long-distance pronominalization in the
conversational material because the level of embedding and the nature of the
embedding seemed to have little influence on anaphora; in the expository
material, on the other hand, there were no clear patterns of extremely
long-distance pronominalization, and the level of embedding turned out to
be crucial for anaphora. Basically, after one level of embedding, the written
material required that a full NP be used.
The long-distance aspect of the anaphora patterns in these two groups of
texts is particularly interesting, since both types allow return pops (a large
source of the long-distance pronominalization in the conversational
material), but they have substantially different constraints on the association of return pops with pronouns: for the conversational data (same-gender
environments aside), pronominalization with a return pop is essentially
unconstrained - that is, it can apply in any structural context - while for the
written data, pronominalization with a return pop was governed by the
following restrictions:
1 The popped-over material contains mention of the relevant referent; or
2 the popped-over material must be structurally non-complex.
The constraints on embedding and pronominalization are equally
disparate. In the conversational material, long-distance pronominalization
is possible even in deeply embedded utterances; in the written material,
however, pronominalization requires that at most one level of embedding be
present, regardless of the nature of the surrounding text.
Quantitative data supporting these differences are presented in Tables
6.1 and 6.2 below. The figures indicate the average distance to the most
recent mention of a given referent for the anaphoric device in question,4 and

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The basic patterns

141

Table 6.1 Referential distance in

conversational and written texts (for
pronouns only)
Referential distance (in clauses)
Conversational
Written

2.52
1.21

Table 6.2 Proportion of each anaphoric device

Conversational
Written

Full NP

Pronoun

Total

87
548

306
608

393
1,156

(22%)
(47%)

(78%)
(53%)

the proportion of each anaphoric device in the two text types. Although, as
we saw in Chapters 3 and 5, the most recent mention of a referent is not
always the relevant antecedent mention, for conformity with the counting
procedures developed in Givon 1983 I have adopted the most recent
mention as the critical reference. The results suggest that (a) full NPs are
much more prevalent in expository written texts than they are in
conversational texts, and (b) the referential distance for pronouns is much
greater in the conversational texts than it is in the written texts.
Long-distance pronominalization - either of the embedding type or of the
return pop type- is thus basically non-existent in the written texts. There is
thus no single abstract pattern with which we could associate terms like
topic, focus, or consciousness (see Fox, forthcoming, b, for a fuller
discussion of this point). Even for the basic pattern there are too many
differences, brought about by convention and channel limitations (Dillon
1981), to allow us to formulate a unifying strategy of anaphora.5
6.3.1

Continuity and anaphora in written and conversational texts

In the discussions of data in Chapters 3 and 5, I tried to indicate points at

which the traditional theory of anaphora (represented by Givdn 1983) falls
short of accounting for the patterns of anaphora exhibited by the texts
chosen. The criticisms leveled against the traditional theory are extremely
strong in the case of the conversational data: long-distance pronominalization is common (some researchers have recorded gaps of up to 30 minutes),

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142 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English

and full NPs can be used in situations where distance would have predicted
a pronoun. In this case, it is entirely clear that a structural approach to texts
is critical for our understanding of anaphora.
The criticisms brought against the traditional theory in the case of the
written data are not so strong, however: we saw that real long-distance
pronominalization probably does not occur (the longest gap in my data
being five clauses), and in a few instances the conditions on pronominalization require circumstances that imply a more string-oriented view of texts
than I am advocating. For example, pronominal return pops exhibit
limitations on complexity of the material popped over (which can be read as
a limitation on distance), but this limitation on complexity can be overcome
if there are mentions of the relevant referent in the popped-over material
(which can also be read as a function of distance). Should we then abandon
the structural approach for the written texts and accept the traditional
theory? If not, what should we say about anaphora in written texts to
account for its apparently more linear nature?6
I firmly believe that the answer to the first question is negative: we did see
that full NPs occur where distance would have predicted pronouns, and the
gaps that do occur fall into structural patterns which can be described using
rhetorical structure analysis; furthermore, the notion of "interfering"
referent can only be accurately described in terms of structure. So we can be
sure that a structural approach illuminates some large portion of the data
that would otherwise remain opaque. We are thus left with the question of
the somewhat more linear nature of anaphora in written texts: how are we to
account for the fact that distance (or something like it) does seem to play a
role in the written texts, while it is minimally important in conversational
texts?
I currently have no definite answer to this question. Since the modes
differ in respect of more than one feature (having different values at least for
formality, plannedness, modality, genre, and number of contributing
participants), it is impossible to say exactly which feature, or which
function, contributes most to the greater dominance of something like
distance in the written texts. As an initial guess, however, I would like to
suggest that the stability of a written text over the period of reading might
make a significant difference in the treatment of anaphora. If we compare
return pops across the modes, the difference will be clear. In conversation,
we saw that a return pop "closes off" the popped-over material, and since
there is no remaining physical trace of that now-closed material, the
interlocutors are free to forget its content.7 In written texts, on the other
hand, there is a very obvious set of physical traces remaining of the

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Demarcating structural units

143

closed-off material, traces which the reader's eye may return to; hence the
reader is less likely to forget the material. Perhaps because of the traces,
then, the intervening material assumes a greater importance in the attention
of the reader than it does when there are no physical traces, and as a result
what appears to be distance assumes a correspondingly greater importance
for anaphora (Dillon 1981; Rubin 1980).
A note of caution regarding such explanations is in order, however. As I
have shown elsewhere (Fox, forthcoming, a), not all genres of written text
show such conservative (and possibly distance-influenced) patterns of
anaphora; the patterns exhibited by written narratives, for example, more
closely resemble the patterns of the conversational texts than those of the
expository texts. It must thus be conceded that it is not just the physical
facts of writing that influence anaphora; the conventions established for
each written genre are also critical in the process.8

6.4 Demarcating structural units

In Chapter 5, we saw that full NPs in expository written texts are often used
at the beginning of rhetorical units where pronouns could have been
appropriate. Such a claim was also made for the conversational material, but
there the pattern was shown to be relatively minor. In Table 6.3, I have
presented indirect evidence that this pattern is extremely widespread in
Table 6.3 Full NP and non-anaphoric functions
Referent in
preceding clause

Referent not in
preceding clause

Total

Written
Full NP 207
Pronoun 513
Total

(38%)
(29%)
(84%)
(71%)

720

Conversational
Full NP 10 (11%)
(6%)
Pronoun 151 (49%)
(94%)
Total

161

341
95

(62%)
(78%)
(16%)
(22%)

436
77
155
232

548
608
1,156

(89%)
(33%)
(51%)
(67%)

87
306
393

Note: The first percentage figure in each pair reads across

(e.g. 207 is 38% of 548), the second reads down (e.g. 207
is 29% of 720).

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144 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English

expository written texts and not at all common in the conversational texts.
The results show clearly the differences between the two types. Even when
the referent is mentioned in the immediately preceding clause, 29 per cent
of the time (207/720) a full NP is used in the written material, whereas in the
same situation in the conversational texts full NPs are used only 6 per cent of
the time (10/161). These findings indicate that full NPs in the written texts
are doing much more than just the standard referent-tracking work
attributed to them: that is, if they occur even when their antecedent is
plainly retrievable from the preceding clause, then they are not simply
performing an anaphoric duty. Rather, they are helping to block the text
into its structural units. 9 This function could not be as common in the
conversational texts as in the written, given the low percentage of references
in this situation done with full NPs.
Furthermore, Table 6.3 suggests that a larger percentage of the full NPs
in the written texts occur under these conditions- i.e., referent mentioned
in preceding clause - than in the conversational texts: 38 per cent (207/548)
of all the full NPs in the written texts occurred under these conditions,
compared to 11 per cent (10/87) for the conversational material. Here again
we see that, while the structuring function of full NPs is prevalent in the
written texts, it is much less so in the conversational texts.
It is interesting that written texts seem, on the one hand, to be more
sensitive than conversational texts to some type of linear distance and, on
the other hand, also to be more sensitive to hierarchic units. These
sensitivities do not contradict one another; rather, they both indicate an
awareness of the extremely important role of the writer's explicitness in
guiding the reader to the intended interpretation of the text (since the reader
can never ask for clarification, and cannot use prosodic information as a
clue): the first sensitivity guides the reader to an interpretation of an
anaphor that s/he might not have been able to make because of interfering
physical "traces"; the second sensitivity guides the reader to an interpretation of the structure of the text that s/he might not otherwise have been able
to make owing to lack of structural "signposts" from the writer.

6.5 Different-gender referents and anaphora

In Chapter 3, I proposed that pronominalization in the environment of a
different-gender referent in the conversational data is quite free. That is, a
return pop over material containing mentions of a different-gender referent
was seen to be done with a pronoun; and if two referents of different genders
appeared in the same adjacency pair, then a mention of either one of them in

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Different-gender referents

145

a "tying" pair could be done with a pronoun. Furthermore, a pronoun could

be used to refer to a person in a second-pair part even if that person was not
mentioned in the first-pair part of the pair but was mentioned in the tied-to
pair:
H. So: en she already wrote him about me en everyth//ing
en she'd li:ke=
N.
H.

Awr:: lght.
= 0') fix us u:p.

N.
H.

Well wt's ( ) he li://ke.

hhhhhhhh a-ah: she says ( ) he y'know
th'las 'time she saw him

In this passage we get a female-gender pronoun in the second-pair part even

though its referent does not appear in the first-pair part of the sequence.
The proposed reason for this distribution is the fact that the relevant
referent appeared in the tied-to pair.
In Chapter 5, on the other hand, I suggested that pronominalization in
the written material in the environment of different-gender referents was
fairly restricted, being limited to the following conditions:
1

If both referents are mentioned in the same proposition, then either one
of them can be pronominalized in the R-structure partner.
2 In a return pop situation, if the popped-over material is structurally
non-complex, then the returned-to referent can be pronominalized.
The differences in distribution are discussed below.
In written expository English texts, then, we do not find a pronoun used
to refer to a person in the adjunct of a structure if there is a reference to a
different-gender person in the nucleus of that R-structure. This pattern
differs from the situation in the conversational material in the following
sense. Let me suggest that an adjacency pair and a tying pair can be seen as
roughly equivalent to the nucleus of an R-structure and an embedded
R-structure realization of its adjunct. That is, the following structures can
be seen to be basically equivalent:
fpp => spp
"ft
\

fpp => spp

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146 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English

The equivalence of these structures arises from the equation of tied-to pair
with nucleus and tying pair with adjunct, and the equation of an adjacency
pair with an R-structure (because each is the basic unit of structure in its
mode). Hence the tying adjacency pair is roughly equatable with an
embedded R-structure, and the first-pair part of the adjacency pair is parallel
to the nucleus of the embedded R-structure.10
Given this comparison, we can see that the conversational material
displays a pattern of pronominalization not seen in the written material.
That is, the conversational material allows a pronoun in the second-pair part
of the tying pair (in the structure shown above), while the written material
appears to require a full NP in the structurally equivalent adjunct of the
embedded R-structure.
Return pops done with pronouns are possible in both the written and the
conversational texts. The constraints on returns in the written texts are
much greater, however, than they are in the conversational data. Basically,
in the conversational texts I could find no constraints on return pops in the
environment of different-gender referents, while in the written texts the
constraints were quite strong:
A return pop can be done with a pronoun even if the popped-over adjunct mentions a
different-gender referent if and only if that adjunct is structurally simple.
Here again we see that the written material exhibits a much more
conservative pattern of anaphora than does the conversational data.
In Table 6.4 I present the results i ;' some text-counts which support the
structural analyses given above. It shows that in a different-gender
environment the modes are skewed in exactly opposite directions with
regard to anaphora: full NP is used 61 per cent (51/83) of the time in the
written material, while pronoun is used 72 per cent (18/25) of the time in the
conversational texts. These figures thus indirectly support the claim that
the constraints on pronominalization are greater in the written texts than
in the conversational texts."
Table 6.4 Anaphora in the environment of
different-gender referents
Written

Conversational

Full NP
Pronoun

51
32

7
18

Total

83

(61%)
(39%)

(28%)
(72%)

25

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Same-gender referents

147

In almost every situation, then, the written texts exhibit a more

conservative pattern of anaphora in the environment of different-gender
referents than do the conversational texts.

6.6 Same-gender referents and anaphora

The conservatism of the written material (with regard to anaphora) is
especially apparent in the environment of same-gender referents. Here, the
only situation in which pronominalization is tolerated in the written texts is
if the two referents are in the same proposition; in the R-structure partner,
the referent that had been in subject role in the first proposition can be
pronominalized. (There are two other minor conditions in which a
non-subject can be pronominalized: see section 5.5.1). Return pops with
pronouns are also allowed in this environment, but only under extremely
restricted conditions.
While same-gender environment is the most restricted environment for
the conversational texts, it is not as constrained as the same environment in
the written texts. Return pops can be done with pronouns in same-gender
environment (assuming there are other linguistic devices used to guide the
reader to the appropriate level of structure), and there appears to be no
singling out of subject NPs for special pronominalization status.
Quantitative evidence which supports the more widespread use of full NP
in the same-gender environment for the written material is given in Table
6.5. Here again we see that full NPs are much more commonly resorted to in
this environment within the written texts than is the case in the
conversational texts.12
Table 6.5 Anaphora in the environment of
same-gender referents
Written

Conversational

Full NP
Pronoun

142
21

9
12

Total

163

(87%)
(13%)

(43%)
(57%)

21

A full comparison of the environments of (a) no interfering referents, (b)

different-gender referents, and (c) same-gender referents in the written and
conversational texts is given in Table 6.6. Notice that, while the

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148 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English

Table 6.6 Anaphora in three environments

Written:
Full NP
Pronoun
Total

No interfering referents

Different-gender

Same-gender

312
553

51
32

142 (87%)
21 (13%)

(36%)
(64%)

(61%)
(39%)

865

83

Conversational:
Full NP
Pronoun

16 (6%)
272 (94%)

7 (28%)
18 (72%)

9 (43%)
12 (57%)

Total

288

25

21

163

conversational texts are obviously sensitive to these environments (reaching

a level of 43 per cent use of full NP), the written texts are clearly more
extreme in their response (reaching a level of 87 per cent use of full NP). It
should also be noted that the percentage of full NPs used increases in a
direction consonant with the structural patterns described in Chapters 3
and 5. That is, we saw that the environment of no interfering referents where "interfering" was determined structurally- allowed the most freedom
of pronominalization, the environment of different-gender referents
showed a slightly more restricted distribution of pronouns, and the
environment of same-gender referents showed a fairly high degree of
restriction on pronominalization; in fact, the figures in Table 6.6 indicate
that the percentage of full NPs increases in just this direction, as one would
have expected intuitively.

6.7

Non-structural factors in anaphora

In Chapters 3 and 5,1 proposed that there are factors other than structural
ones that affect the anaphoric patterning in texts. That is, I was suggesting
that it is not just the hierarchic organization of clauses and propositions that
determines which anaphoric device will be used at any given point; rather,
there are non-structural factors which also, in perhaps a secondary way,
influence anaphoric choices. The non-structural factors which were claimed
to be relevant for the anaphoric distribution in each of the modes are listed
in Table 6.7. The factors which involve multi-party interaction are
obviously excluded from the written material (this includes disagreements
and replacements of utterances). The others are discussed below.

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Non-structural factors in anaphora

149

Table 6.7 Non-structural factors in

conversation and writing
Conversational

Written

Replacement of an utterance
Disagreeing

Further description
Classification
Comparison and contrast

Overt recognitionals
Assessments
Category membership

Two of the factors which were claimed to be important in the

conversational texts may also play some role in the written material,
although they were not mentioned with regard to the latter. These are overt
recognitionals and assessments.
We may recall that overt recognitionals are phrases which, instead of
presupposing the recognition of a participant, explicitly claim that
recognition as their function. Such phrases as know X, remember X were
said to be overt recognitionals. I proposed in Chapter 3 that overt
recognitionals provided an environment in which full NPs could be used
when pronouns would have been predicted from the hierarchic structure.
By excluding this category of non-structural factors from the discussion
on anaphora in the written texts, I did not mean to imply that such factors
had no possible place in determining anaphora; on the contrary, it seems
quite probable that if I could find instances of overt recognitionals, they
would be seen to behave in very much the same way in the written texts as
they do in the conversational texts. Unfortunately, I was unable to find
examples of this type of non-structural influence in my texts.
Essentially the same situation holds for assessments. While I do not doubt
that assessments in written texts can be done with full NPs, I found only one
instance in all the texts that appeared to provide some empirical support for
this intuition:
His greatest satisfaction . . . was his use of his power, when he became a senior boy,
to put an end to offensive sexual practices in the school. "When I left for St. Paul's in
1894," he wrote with a note of distinct pride years later, "the atmosphere had
changed from that of a sordid brothel to that more appropriate tofiftyfairly happy
small boys under the age of fourteen." Leonard was a reformer from the first. (A
House of Lions, p. 23)

In this passage it seems clear that an assessment is being done with a full NP.
The pattern is not widely enough documented to treat it as an established

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150 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English

phenomenon, however, so I have not included it in the discussion of
anaphora in written texts. Nonetheless, with a broader and larger database
it is likely that assessment will be a strong category under non-structural
factors.
One non-structural factor in the conversational data which appears to
have no place in the written texts is category membership. In this case, a
first mention of a referent is done with a pronoun rather than a full NP, and
no fuller specification of the person's identity is necessarily forthcoming
(because the exact identity is irrelevant to the interaction). I found no
instances of this pattern in the written material, and I expect that there are
no instances to be found. This belief is based on several different types of
reasoning: first, writers and readers do not initially have enough shared
knowledge to allow any given participant's identity to be thoroughly known
to both parties (except, perhaps, in the case of He to mean God); second, in
all my experience with expository prose I have no recollection of initial
pronominal use which is not followed by a fuller explication of the
participant's identity (suspenseful uses of initial pronouns do not count
here, since the identity is eventually disclosed; here suspense, and precisely
not anaphoric resolution, is the author's goal). We have here, then, a fairly
substantive discrepancy in the use of pronouns in conversational and
written texts.
The first factor which is apparent in written texts but not in my
conversational texts is comparison and contrast. In the written material, I
found that if two (or more) people are compared or contrasted with regard
to some characteristic or feature, then both will be realized with full NPs.
Although I have no examples of this factor in the conversational texts I
examined, there is some reason to suspect that in fact it does operate in
conversation as it does in writing: in her study of the use of it and that in
spoken apartment layout narratives, Linde (1979) found that when speakers
described the physical layout of their apartments, that was used when the
speaker wished to contrast one room (or apartment) with another, even if it
would have been expected for structural reasons. We thus have, in spoken
texts, something in the direction of a full NP used in a situation of contrast.
Since the modes thus probably do not differ in this respect, I will not offer any
further discussion of this particular factor.
There are two additional factors which are characteristic of the written
texts but do not seem to be relevant to the conversational material: Further
Description and Classification.13 These factors are not excluded absolutely
from conversational interaction: but since the functions in written texts

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Non-structural factors in anaphora

151

which work together to produce them are not common in conversational

texts, they are not often observable. The functions which are involved in
Further Description appear to be a combination of lack of space and a fair
amount of information to be presented in that space. A full NP in the
Further Description environment allows both of these conflicting constraints to be accommodated, since a small amount of space is used to
convey a maximum load of information. Since in natural, spontaneous
conversation there is only in rare instances a shortage of "space" (time) and a
need to convey a heavy dose of information, the efficient use of a full NP in
the further description mode is almost never made (I found no instances of
it in my data). Furthermore, it is almost certainly the case that such use of a
full NP is felt to be associated with generic conventions of particular
text-types, and hence might be generically (i.e. having to do with genre)
inappropriate in the context of natural conversation.
The needs filled by the full NP in the Classification environment are not
clear to me: but, as I suggested in Chapter 5, they probably have something
to do with stylistic variety and colorfulness of phrasing (hence this
environment was found much more frequently in longer, more literary texts
than in short, to-the-point texts). Although conversationalists are sensitive
to variation and poetic phrasing (see Tannen 1984), they appear not tc
engage in selecting colorful full NPs to describe persons whose identities
have already been established.14
We can see from this brief discussion of the differences in non-structural
factors in written and conversational texts that it is the discrepancy in
circumstances and communicative needs, as well as generic conventions,
that determines which factors will arise in one mode and not in another.
Conversation, of course, leans towards factors which involve the overt
interaction of two or more interlocutors and an overt consolidation of their
mutual knowledge and affect, while expository writing leans towards factors
which involve the restrictions imposed on writing by lack of space and lack
of mutual knowledge between the relevant parties, as well as by conventions
of the mode. The differences in anaphoric patterning are thus somewhat
predictable from the differences in communicative needs. Generic conventions cannot, however, be dismissed as a source of difference.

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7 Conclusions

The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic

forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological
act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction
implemented in an utterance or utterances.
(Voloshinovl973:94)

In addition to the issues mentioned explicitly in Chapter 1, the previous

chapters have raised several larger theoretical issues which I have not yet
addressed. I would like to touch on two of these fundamental issues here, if
only superficially, to open these concerns up for discussion. The two issues
I would like to address explicitly here are the localness of linguistic
patterning and the nature of discourse structure.

7.1 Localness
In Chapter 6, I raised the issue of genre-specific conventions of anaphoric
patterning. As we have seen, there is no single rule for anaphora that can be
specified for all of English (even the limited subset of third-person singular
human examined here); instead, we have a variety of specific patterns which
obviously share a number of general characteristics, but which nevertheless
differ enough to require separate formulation (Fox, forthcoming, b). This
is one level at which patterns are local (specific to a particular genre) rather
than global (specifiable for all of English). There are other levels at which
the idea of localness seems fruitful; it is to these levels that I would like to turn
now.
In his paper "Meaning and memory," Bolinger (1976) presents a model of
language in which a single language is viewed as a "gerry-rigged" system
with no overarching structure; instead, there is tight structure at a lower,
local level, and only loose connections between these tightly organized local
segments (this corresponds in some ways with Wittgenstein's metaphor of
language as a European city). Forms are related by analogy in a pattern of

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Localness

153

family resemblance. This portrait of grammar obviously contrasts with the

more traditional one offered by structuralists and formal grammarians, in
which language is seen as a tightly knit set of interrelated forms.
Another view of localness appears in Sacks et al. 1974, in their treatment
of the turn-taking system for English conversation (see Chapter 2 for
details). In this piece, Sacks et al. postulate a set of fairly abstract rules
which are said to govern turn-taking behavior in natural conversation. In
spite of the abstractness of the rules, however, they suggest that turn-taking
is in fact locally managed - that is, worked out each time anew in the
particular situation at hand:
We have reasons to take seriously the possibility that a characterization of
turn-taking organization for conversation could be developed which would have the
important twin features of being context-free and capable of extraordinary
context-sensitivity. . . .
One reason for expecting the existence of some such type of organization is as
follows. Conversation can accommodate a wide range of situations, interactions in
which persons in varieties . . . of identities are operating; it can be sensitive to the
various combinations; and it can be capable of dealing with a change of situation
within a situation. (Sacks et al. 1974: 699)

In this case, then, we have an abstract system which is actually instantiated

in a highly local, context-sensitive manner.
Both of these notions of localness - locally structured and locally managed
- support, and receive support from, the analyses offered here. The
analyses of anaphoric patterning described in Chapters 3 and 5 support the
notion of local structure by the fact that even within a single discourse-type,
even for this limited domain within anaphora, it was necessary to identify
as many as thirteen subpatterns - hardly a good case for an overarching
principle of anaphora in English.
The analyses also support the notion of local management, in that they
offer a loosely structured system of fairly abstract patterns (although not
really "context-free" in the sense defined by Sacks et al.) which are also
highly situated in their relation to real-time use. In other words, by
themselves these patterns cannot predict which device will be chosen for a
certain situation, because the outcome of any given anaphoric choice will be
exactly fitted to the particulars of the situation, rather than to some abstract
pattern. The patterns described are thus both abstract and situationally
defined.
Given the importance of this interplay between local and abstract, then,
we can say, following Rumelhart et al. 1986, that local organization is more

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154 Conclusions
basic in understanding language than has been assumed previously (see also
Bates and MacWhinney, forthcoming; Brooks 1978; Serwatka 1986;
Hopper 1986; and others working in the Connectionist paradigm: Hinton
and Anderson 1981; McClelland and Rumelhart 1985); it is from this local
organization that more general rules and abstractions emerge:
Schemata are not "things." There is no representational object which is a schema.
Rather, schemata emerge at the moment they are needed from the interaction of
large numbers of much simpler elements all working in concert with one another.
Schemata are not explicit entities, but rather are implicit in our knowledge and are
created by the very environment that they are trying to interpret - as it is
interpreting them. (Rumelhart et al. 1986: 18)
This view of patterns as emergent from smaller structures represents a clear
break from the philosophies of language behavior now widely accepted in
linguistics and cognitive science. As such, it is a critical step forward in our
understanding of linguistic behavior.

7.2 Discourse structure

It is a natural outcome of this emphasis on localness that we re-examine our
notion of discourse structure. If, for example, schemata are not "things" but
are emergent out of smaller units, then presumably the structure one finds
in a finished text or conversation is a by-product in some way of the many
smaller, locally situated units produced in real-time (see Ladefoged 1980,
for a related point). This is perhaps somewhat less true of planned
expository prose than of conversation, since in the former the writer has the
opportunity to create something which is tightly organized; but it is still
certainly true of on-line reading. It should be clear, then, that an approach
which describes the structure of completed texts, and then relates that
structure to the uses of anaphora, falls prey to the misrepresentations
common to any approach which ignores the localness of linguistic
phenomena.
The analyses of conversation presented in this study follow closely the
notion of structure as emergent from the local management of small units. I
have heeded Schegloff (1981: 89) in treating the orderliness of anaphora as
locally managed, and achieved:
If certain stable forms appear to emerge or recur in talk, they should be understood
as an orderliness wrested by the participants from interactional contingency, rather
than as automatic products of standardized plans. Form, one might say, is also the
distillate of action and/or interaction, not only its blueprint. If that is so, then the

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Conclusion

155

description of forms of behavior, forms of discourse (such as stories) included, has

to include interaction among their constitutive domains.
The analyses given in Chapter 3 stress the contingency of conversational
action, the interactive nature of conversational structure, and the mutual
creation of discourse and grammar. In these analyses, then, the fine
interplay between abstract pattern and situatedness is handled in a way
consonant with the paradigm suggested by Rumelhart et al. and Sacks et al.
The analyses of expository prose presented do not quite so obviously
follow this model of emergent structure. This is a result of the fact that the
interplay between abstract structure and local situatedness is more complex
for written texts than for conversation. In the case of written texts, there is a
finished product which has been designed to be seen as an integrated whole;
and yet clearly the reading process, which the writer must anticipate with
the use of things like anaphoric devices, is locally situated (van Dijk and
Kintsch 1983; Iser 1975) and very much a process rather than a product
(Dillon 1981). In dealing with the structure of written texts, then, we must
acknowledge these two aspects: text as a finished static product, and text as
an emergent constructing process.2
The analyses I have offered for the expository data try to straddle these
two aspects of written texts, on the one hand by focusing on the real-time
interpretation of propositions in a text, how they are fit into small units, and
how this real-time process relates to anaphora, and on the other hand by
recognizing the structure of a passage as a whole, as it might have been
conceived by the author. Thus the rather greater emphasis in Chapter 5 on
static structural factors is not a mistake: written texts do have this product
side to them that conversations do not share.3 But the product aspect is
counterbalanced by a consistent view to the reading process.

7.3 Conclusion
This model of language, which sees patterning as emergent from smaller,
specific instances, and structure as emerging from the interaction of many
smaller units, comes at a time when new ways of looking at language
behavior, especially discourse behavior, are critical if we are to extend our
understanding of the relationships between language, cognition, and
society. The patterns of anaphora described in this study, in all their
variety, are offered in the spirit of this new tradition of locally emergent
structure, in celebration of the apparent paradox of the local yet abstract
nature of linguistic behavior.

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Notes

Introduction

1 See Partee 1984 for a somewhat different perspective on discourse anaphora.

2 For example, it turns out not to be the case that simply having another referent in
the vicinity (even one of the same gender) counts as problematic for the
hearer/reader.
2

Conversational analysis
1 Reichman (1981) develops a relevant method of analyzing conversation which
she calls "context space theory." It is not complete enough to use for the data I
examine here - it does not, for example, cover interactional units like invitations,
announcements, and their various responses - but her style of analysis has been
critical for some of the notions developed in Chapters 3 and 5, so it is worth
giving a brief overview of her method here.
In this work, Reichman distinguishes twelve relations: support, restatement
of point being supported, interruption, return after interruption, indirect
challenge, direct challenge, concede subargument, prior logical abstraction,
contrastive respecification, analogy, further development.
In addition, each context space - similar to Grosz's focus space - is assigned a
status that reflects its current prominence in the conversation. Some of the
statuses, with their definitions, are given below (Reichman 1981:86). Reichman
uses these statuses in analyzing the anaphora in her data.
Active

The context space in which the utterances currently being stated

are placed. There can only be one active context space at a given
point in the conversation.
Controlling The context space in direct relation to which an active context
space is being developed. There can only be one controlling
context space at a given point in the conversation.
Open
A previously active context space that was interrupted before
completion of its corresponding communicative goal.
Closed
A context space discussion of which is believed completed for the
present time.
2 For a discussion of notation as theory, see Ochs 1979a.

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Notes to pages 17-24

157

3 Anaphora in conversational English

1 The transcripts used here were graciously made available to me by Manny
Schegloff.
2 Although this study focuses on the distribution of anaphoric devices, rather than
on their production or resolution, the findings are very much in keeping with the
conclusions on anaphoric processing offered by Tyler and Marslen-Wilson
(1982: 281). Tyler and Marslen-Wilson suggest that resolution is not an
all-or-none search process according to the lexical properties of the relevant
pronoun; rather, it involves "multiple activation of potential antecedents":
According to this view, the constraints on anaphor resolution that derive
from the lexical properties of a pronoun are a relatively subsidiary aspect
of the resolution process. The more dominant factor is what we have been
calling pragmatic inference - those processes that assess the interpretative
plausibility of potential antecedents. . . . They should not necessarily be
restricted to just a single antecedent selected on the basis of other criteria,
but rather should be able to operate on the wider set of potential
antecedents offered by the discourse at that particular moment.

5
6

The distributions described by the present study can be seen as delimiting

what the discourse offers in the way of potential antecedents. This kind of work,
then, although not directly involved with resolution, furthers our understanding
of what referents the hearer/reader has available for achieving resolution of a
given anaphor. See also Clark and Haviland 1977 and Sanford and Garrod 1981
for a psychological perspective on resolution of discourse anaphors.
I have characterized the status of the sequence as "not closed," rather than
"continuing," because I mean for the pattern to characterize what the sequence
has come to by the time the speaker produces the anaphor in question (e.g.
closed or not closed) rather than what the speaker is going to do with the
sequence (e.g. continue it or start something else). This formulation is meant in
part to capture the fact that speakers use full NPs to continue an already fully
closed sequence. Just continuing is thus not sufficient grounds for pronominal ization.
The fairly lengthy silences before the turn expansions in each of the following
examples can be thought of as the "noise" of the turn-taking system going
through its ordered rules - perhaps through more than one cycle - (until rule
l(c) is reached).
Throughout this discussion I will use the term tying to refer to the subsequent
pair, and the term tied-to to refer to the preceding pair.
The observation that members of a series are at the same level of structure rather than one being subordinate to another - is reflected in the annotations of
the examples by keeping the structure-level character the same, e.g. (fpp (l,a))
and (fpp (2,a)).
It is also possible that S's last line is a second-pair part to H's announcement; in
this case, the pronoun occurs within the adjacency pair. Either of these analyses
is consistent with the basic pattern proposed above.

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158 Notes to pages 25-65

8 This fact probably does not have a significant structural basis but is rather a
coincidental aspect of the data examined.
9 The term pop comes from the Augmented Transition Network grammar
metaphor: see Reichman 1981 for a detailed discussion.
10 The pronoun in line 32 contrasts with a full NP of the form that guy - C could
have said What's that guy's name?
I l l give a full explication of how this structure is achieved below.
12 B does not indicate that she has heard A's utterance as a joke. This could be a
result of any of a number of factors, including the possibility that B does not want
to give A the satisfaction of having made a successful "funny." In spite of B's lack
of response, however, we can hear A's utterance as a joke, based on a willful
misinterpretation of B's So I'm sure they're happy about that.
13 1 am using "native intuition" here in finding the referent of that in B's line 18.
14 In practice, of course, this adjacency pair "chaining" is limited.
15 It is probably the case that the sort of move C makes at line 20 has a limited range
of distribution; that is, it probably could not have been done successfully if G's
line 12 had engendered a lengthy discussion about Sundusky track. For such a
move to come off, it is almost certainly necessary for the party attempting it to
nip the "interrupting" material in the bud, as it were.
16 Reichman (1981) notes that if a claim is made, after which some evidence is
given to support the claim, a return to the claim will close the evidence off.
Returns after interruptions are also said to close off the interrupting material.
17 Admittedly, this last mention of Little might well have been done with a full NP
even if a return pop had not intervened because of the adjacency-pair "chain" that
occurs between the two relevant mentions. This other possibility does not,
however, negate the possibility that the return pop closes off for pronominalization the Marlon Little sequence of lines 11-21.
18 1 say "presumably" because I have no evidence from my data to support, or not
support, this pattern. I would expect, however, on the basis of the rest of the
findings, that anaphora in different-gender environments is similar in this
respect to the environment of no "interfering" referents.
19 Schegloff (1979) has noted a similar phenomenon at the beginning of new
topics.
20 It is probably the case that the "Sam" mentioned at line 17 is Tucker; it cannot be
conclusively shown, however, that Sam and Tucker are not two different people.
21 It is also possible that M hears that the sequence containing mention of Hawkins
has been closed down by the lengthy lapse at line 41 and the talk at lines 42-8
about the weather. In this case, the full NP would reflect M's understanding that
the sequence has been closed, rather than having anything to do with competing
referents. In fact, both of these factors may in some sense operate at once.
22 This reference will be discussed later.
23 Reichman 1981 and Grosz 1977 are examples of analyses which do not deal with
cases where pronouns would have been interpretable, but where full NPs are
nonetheless used.
24 This example contains not just a simple know+iul\ NP but rather full
NP+know+pro - something like a left-dislocation (e.g. Mary, I like her). The

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Notes to pages 69-94

159

point here is that, in the context of overtly determining the recognitionality of a

referent, a full NP is likely to appear.
25 The reason for starting a new unit with the marked member of an opposition (in
this case, full NP) is unclear; nonetheless, it is a documentable phenomenon
across languages (see Fox, forthcoming (c)).
26 Arguably one main clause and one subordinate clause.
4 Rhetorical structure analysis
1 Rumelhart (1975), Mandler and Johnson (1977), and Dressier (1978) explore
the notion of text-oriented grammars. In his more recent work, however,
Rumelhart has moved away from a grammar metaphor for text schemata towards
a connectionist approach (see Rumelhart et al. 1986).
2 Meyer's system (e.g. Meyer 1985) is probably the closest to rhetorical structure
analysis of the models mentioned above. Her work is also based on Grimes 1975.
3 Many of the assumptions of the model are based on Grimes 1975.
4 For most of the structures which contain an adjunct and a nucleus, either
ordering of these elements is possible - that is, under certain conditions the
adjunct can precede the nucleus, and under other conditions the nucleus can
precede the adjunct. For some of the structures, however, different orderings
are not possible; for example, it would be odd to find the evidence supporting a
claim (adjunct) before the claim (nucleus). These asymmetries in ordering are
not germane to the present study, however, and so play no role in the following
discussions.
5 Embedding here is used to refer to text-structural embedding, not syntactic
embedding.
6 I have taken the term issue from Reichman (1981), who uses it to refer to the
main claim of an argument.
7 As with all instances of categorization, the prototype cases of each adjunct-type
are clearly distinguishable from one another; in some cases, however, it is hard to
make a convincing argument for an adjunct being one rather than another of
these types. That is, it is often hard to say why something is being claimed to be
an Elaboration adjunct rather than a Background adjunct. The lack of clear
boundaries between these relations does not affect the basis of the claims about
anaphora given in the next chapter, however, so I will not be overly concerned
here with arguing for one interpretation or another. If there are defining criteria,
they have not yet been fully established.
8 These adjuncts are probably better analyzed as members of a List structure i.e., members of the same adjunct node - but in order to avoid confusion I have
temporarily analyzed them as separate adjuncts.
9 The texts from which examples are drawn for this chapter are described in detail
in section 5.2.1.
5 Anaphora in expository written English texts
1 For the anonymous articles in the newspapers and magazines, it is not possible to
tell if the authors are native speakers of American English; nonetheless, the

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160 Notes to pages 94-112

articles are edited by native speakers of American English for an American
English audience, so should be suitably native for the purposes of the present
study. All the interactants in the conversations are identifiably native speakers of
American English.
2 A House of Lions is unusual biography in that it does not attempt, as its main
focus, to chronicle the linear passage of time in each biographee's life. In this
regard, its psychoanalytic basis is crucial in making it an appropriate text for this
study.
3 Texts that met these criteria were selected for inclusion in the study until what
appeared to be a satisfactory representation of each source was achieved. The
number of instances of each source is given below.
1 Twenty articles from the Los Angeles Times.
2 Twenty articles from University Bulletin.
3 Four chapters from Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, totalling approximately
thirty pages.
4 Eleven articles from People.
A fairly even sampling of each source was thus obtained.
4 The texts ranged in length from two paragraphs to eight pages.
5 The terms active and controlling will be defined shortly.
6 See Ch. 3 for a thorough discussion of return pops and anaphora in the
conversational texts.
7 But see the later discussion on internal articulation in general.
8 See Reichman 1981 for a discussion of return pops "reactivating" the items to
which they return.
9 The pronominal reference to the nurse in the return pop follows the first pattern
of pronominal return pops discussed above.
10 See section 5.6 for a discussion of non-structural factors in the choice of full NP
over pronoun.
11 A related, but distinct, idea has been offered by Hinds (1979). Hinds suggests
that paragraphs are organized into peak and non-peak sentences, where peak is
correlated with informativity. Non-peak sentences are associated with pronouns, while peak sentences are associated with full NPs. One could see the
unit-initial slot as high in informativity (most unexpected, least predictable
content) and therefore a possible position for peak sentences.
12 Proposition 4 would probably have been done with a full NP in any case, because
of the same-gender referent in the preceding adjunct. See section 5.5 for a
discussion of same-gender referents.
13 It is clear that this formulation of the association between full NP and rhetorical
structure could lead to circularity: the analyst could easily postulate that every
time a full NP is encountered, a new rhetorical unit has been started. In future
studies this circularity could be minimized by selecting several non-biased
analysts familiar with the text-parsing technique to do the relevant analyses, or
by first replacing all the appropriate NPs with blanks before doing the analysis. I
feel that the association will stand, but it needs to be demonstrated in more
rigorously non-circular ways before it can be counted as fully documented.

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Notes to pages 114-41

161

14 In some cases, strictly following one of the principles can make a genre-related
statement, as in the obituary given below - an obituary of a young feminist,
written by a feminist writer for a feminist audience:
Joan Kelly, a leading feminist scholar, teacher, and activist, died of cancer
on August 15, 1982, in New York City.
A founding member of the Renaissance Society of America, she wrote
an important book: Leone Batista Alberti: Universal Man of the
Renaissance. Later, she was to question whether the Renaissance really
did champion a universal humanist ethic for women as well as for men in
her classic essay, "Did Women have a Renaissance?"
Her early political activities marked the beginning of a lifelong
commitment to combine activism with scholarship, practice with theory.
She helped to found the United Federation of College Teachers and
worked for a policy of open enrollment in the City College of New York as
a practical means of overcoming discrimination against minority groups.
During the 1960s she was also deeply involved in the antiwar movement.
In the late 1960s her interests turned to feminism and socialism. . . .
(Ms, December 1982)
The genre convention of beginning new rhetorical units with full NPs is ignored
in this obituary, which almost certainly makes some statement about the
relationship between the writer and the reader and the norms of the larger
society.
15 Cf. Reichman 1981, in which it is claimed that only one referent is in high focus
(and hence pronominalizable) at a time.
16 It is interesting to note in this regard that all the cases described here have
involved the use of full NP where we could have expected pronouns; I found no
non-structural factors which "induced" the use of pronoun where we could have
expected full NP.
6 Anaphora in expository written and conversational English
1 I have avoided the term spoken in this study because it includes all texts
produced by mouth - even orally produced monologues (such as classroom
lectures or speeches). Since I have concentrated explicitly on non-monologic
and spontaneous spoken language, I have preferred to use the narrower term
conversational.
2 An excellent review of the literature on spoken and written language is provided
in Akinnaso 1982.1 have omitted discussion of much of that literature here, since
it is not relevant to the phenomenon under study.
3 I see nothing wrong with defining these terms operationally, in terms of
discourse structure, except that it further burdens already overworked
terminology.
4 This measurement technique is based on the method developed in Giv6n 1983.
5 Cf. Wittgenstein(1958: 12):
If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view, you will

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162 Notes to pages 142-7

perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: "What is a question?" Is it the
statement that I do not know such-and-such, or the statement that I wish
the other person would tell me . . . ? Or is it the description of my mental
state of uncertainty? - And is the cry "Help!" such a description?
6 It is possible that the recency model of anaphora was developed precisely
because the focus of early work on anaphora was based on written, rather than
conversational, English.
7 Obviously this statement should not be taken to indicate that participants
immediately forget everything that was said in a closed environment - if
something extremely hurtful was said, for example, the structure of the
conversation will not automatically make the recipient of the wound forget the
injury. What I mean is that this material is the least likely of any available to be
brought up for future talk and thus it can be disattended to.
8 In Fox, forthcoming, b, I explore the possibility that a common algorithm could
be developed for the basic anaphoric patterns of conversation and expository
writing. The algorithm turns out to depend crucially on what is considered the
main discourse unit of organization for each discourse-type, and this unit can
only be specified by convention. So even the simplest pattern cannot be unified
for the discourse-types examined.
9 I do not mean to claim here that this is the only possible reason for using a full NP
when the referent is mentioned in the preceding clause. However, based on the
non-quantitative work presented in Chs. 3 and 5, it seems safe to suggest that the
demarcation of structural units is the major reason for this pattern.
10 1 would not want to say that the second-pair part of an adjacency pair has an
adjunct status with regard to the first-pair part: the two parts might have parity
in the pair. We could thus say that an adjacency pair is equatable to a bi-nuclear
R-structure.
11 For the purposes of this count, a reference was considered to be in a
different-gender environment if the preceding clause contained (a) a subject NP
that referred to a person of another gender, or (b) a mention of a referent of
another gender, in any case role, if no other referent was also mentioned in the
clause/proposition. That is, the italicized device in the first two of the
hypothetical sentences below is considered to be in a different-gender
environment, while the device in the last sentence is not considered to be in such
an environment:
Susan was home with David, but he was unhappy
While Susan was in school, Martin was home with the kids
David was taking care of Susan, but he was unhappy
The method of counting thus possibly excludes some cases which are
potentially relevant to the issue of "interfering" referents. Initial mentions of
referents were excluded from this count, since their behavior is obviously not
influenced by the appearance of other referents: they are always done with full
NPs.
12 A reference was considered to be in the environment of "same gender" if a

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Notes to pages 150-5

163

referent of the same gender was mentioned in the preceding clause (a) as the
grammatical subject of that clause, or (b) as the only referent in the clause. Initial
mentions of referents were excluded from the count.
13 Recall that further description includes full NPs like the lance corporal which
provide information that was previously unknown about a referent; classification
includes full NPs like the Swede or the child, which provide no new information
about the referent but only serve to place the referent in a category.
14 Phrases which convey negative or positive assessment are used with great elan the dirty bastard, etc. - and are accounted for under Affect and Assessment.
7

Conclusions

1 Some of the points made in the following discussion have also been made in Fox,
forthcoming, b.
2 The analogy with light as particle and light as wave is an apt one, since we can see
light as both static and a dynamic process, depending on our purposes; see
Young et al. 1970.
3 Except perhaps when viewed as a finished transcript by an analyst.

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Author index

Akinnaso, N. 137, 138, 161n2

Alvarado, S. 77
Anderson, J. 154
Atkinson, J. 6, 15
Bates, E. 154
Becker, A. 77, 163n2
Bennett, T. 137
Biber, D. 137-9
Black, J. 77
Bolinger, D. 3, 152
Bosch, P. 1, 2
Bransford, J. 77
Britton, B. 77
Brooks, L. 154
Brown, J. S. 77
Burton, D. 15

Grimes, J. 77, 159n2

Grosz, B. 1, 29, 30, 76, 139, 140, 156nl,
158n23
Guindon, R. 30, 76
Gundel, J. 140
Halliday, M. 1
Hasan, R. 1
Haviland, S. 157n2
Hinds, J. 77, 160nll
Hinton, G. 153, 154, 155, 159nl
Hirsch, E. 91
Hopper, P. 77, 154
Iser, W. 94, 155
Jefferson, G. 3, 8, 10, 12, 17, 153, 155
Johnson, N. 78, 159nl

Chafe, W. 137, 139

Clancy, P. 112
Clark, H. 157n2
Coulthard, M. 15

Kamp, H. 77
Keenan, E. O. 137
Kintsch, W. 1, 77, 78, 91, 155
Koffka, K. 117

D'Angelo, F. 77
de Beaugrande, R. 77
Decker, R. 3
Dillon, G. 2, 77, 78, 132, 139, 141, 143,
155
Dressier, W. 159nl
Drew, P. 6, 15
Du Bois, J. 2
Duranti, A. 2, 62, 64
Fillmore, C. 73
Fox, B. 141, 143, 152, 159n25, 162n8,
163nl
Garrod, S. 77, 157n2
Giv6n, T. 1, 18, 45, 107, 131, 139, 141,
161n4
Goodman, S. 3, 77, 78
Goodwin, C. 15
Graesser, A. 3, 77, 78

Ladefoged, P. 154
Levinson, S. 6, 10, 11, 12, 15
Levy, E. 112
Linde, C. 1, 62, 150
McClelland, J. 153, 154, 155, 159nl
McHoul, A. 93
McKeown, K. 77
Mandler, J. 78, 159nl
Mann, W. 3, 77
MacWhinney, B. 154
Marslen-Wilson, W. 1, 56, 112, 157n2
Matthiessen, C. 3
Mayer, A. 78
Meyer, B. 77, 78, 96, 159n2
Montgomery, M. 15
Ochs, E. 137, 156n2
O'Donnell, R. 137

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170 Author index

Partee, B. 156nl
Pike, K. 77, 163n2
Pomerantz, A. 15
Prince, E. 2, 57, 67, 139, 140
Reichman, R. 1, 30, 48, 76, 95, 139, 140,
156nl, 158n23, 159n6, 160n8, 161nl5
Reinhart, T. 1-3
Rice, G. 77, 78, 96
Rubin, A. 4, 137, 143
Rumelhart, D. 153-5, 159nl
Sacks, H. 3, 8, 10, 12, 15, 17, 22, 30, 39,
40, 153, 155
Sanford, A. 77, 157n2
Schank, R. 77
Schegloff, E. 3, 8, 10, 12, 15, 17, 21, 30,
39, 40, 132, 153-5, 158nl6
Schenkein, J. 15

Serwatka, M. 154
Sidner, C. 1, 76
Smolensky, P. 153, 155, 159nl
Tannen, D. 137, 151
Terasaki, A. 15
Thavenius, C. 75
Thompson, S. 3, 77
Tomlin, R. 112
Tyler, L. 1, 56, 112, 157n2
van Dijk, T. 1, 77, 78, 91, 155
Voloshinov, V. 152
Webber, B. 1
Winterowd, W. 77
Wittgenstein, L. 2, 152, 161n5
Young, R. 77, 163n2

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Subject index
active state (of a discourse unit): 48, 51,
57, 95-9, 105, 118, 119, 120-4, 1289, 135, 139, 156nl
adjacency pair chain: 37-8, 158nl4
adjacency pairs: see conversational analysis
adjunct (definition of): 79, 101
affective factors (in discourse): 1, 4, 624,
66
ambiguity: 3, 48, 50-4, 56-7, 60, 108,
123, 128, 131
anaphora:
basic patterns, in conversation: 1845;
in writing: 95111
comparison of conversation and writing:
137-51
different gender: 3; conversation vs.
writing: 144-7; in conversation: 45-8;
in writing: 11823
non-structural patterns (in
conversation): 6275
non-structural patterns (in writing):
132-5
same gender: 3; conversation vs.
writing: 147-8; in conversation: 48
62; in writing: 123-31
traditional theories of: 18, 31, 41, 53,
99, 107, 113, 141, 142, 162n6
apartment layout narratives: 150
assessments: 66, 75, 149-50, 163nl4
breaks in structure: see demarcating new
unit
classification (of a referent): 133-4, 1501
comparison and contrast: 134-5, 150
cognitive science: 1, 154
connectionism: 154; see also local
patterning
consciousness, hearer's: 1, 139
context (determines use) 16-17, 93
context space theory: 156nl
controlling state (of a discourse unit): 95
6, 99-108, 122-3, 135, 139, 156nl
conventions (in discourse): 2, 141, 151;
see also genre

conversational analysis: 3-4, 6-15

adjacency pairs: 1214
transcription: see transcript
turn-taking: 10-12, 153
data (description of): 3
conversational: 17-18
written: 94-5, 160n5
demarcating a new unit (with full NP):
69-72, 111-18, 136, 143-4
table of counts: 113, 143
vs. continuing a unit: 113, 11516
different gender referents: see anaphora
disagreements: 62-4, 75
discourse anaphora: 156nl
discourse and grammar (mutual creation
of): 155
discourse structure:
beginning a new unit: see demarcating
new units
differences between conversation and
writing: 3-4, 139-41
localness of: 152, 154-5
units in conversation: 10-14
units in writing: 78-89
distance-based theories of anaphora: see
anaphora, traditional theories of
embedding in R-structures: 89-91, 99,
140, 159n4
emergent structure (of grammar and
discourse): 1545
ethnomethodology: see conversational
analysis
first mention of referent with pronoun: see
pronominalization
floating relations: see rhetorical structure
analysis
focus: 1, 76, 139, 140, 141
frames: 66-9
full noun phrases:
and affective factors: see affective factors
as unmarked strategy: 40-5, 58-62, 108
11, 122-3, 128-31

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172 Subject index

full noun phrases contd.
in demarcating units: see demarcating
new units
in return pops: 40-4, 58-60, 109-10,
122-3, 130-1
in writing vs. conversation: 13941,
146-8
further description (of a referent): 132-3,
150-7
genre: 2, 130, 131, 134, 142, 143, 151
and feminism: 161nl4
genre-specific: 152
see also text-types
given-new: 57, 140
grammatical conditions on discourse
anaphora: 124, 128, 147
Hierarchical structure (of discourse): 1-4,
77, 123
information:
flow: 157
processing: 1
relationships: 23, 78
interfering referent: 45, 48, 121, 127, 131,
133, 135, 142, 147, 148; see also
different gender; same gender
internal articulation: 117
language games: 2, 161n5
local patterning: 1524; see also
connectionism
long-distance pronominalization: see
pronominalization
narratives: 143
natural language processing: 2930
non-structural factors: see anaphora
nucleus (definition of): 79, 101
paragraphing: 113
participant tracking: 2; see also referent
tracking 2
peak sentences: 160nll
pronominalization:
as unmarked strategy: 18, 20-40, 45-57,
95-108, 118-22, 123-8
in conversation vs. writing: 13941,
144-8
in first mentions: 66-9
in return pops: 28-30, 35-6, 49, 50-4,
56, 102-8, 120-2, 135-8, 140-2, 1457
in retroactive reopening of sequence:
38-40

long-distance: 29-30, 76, 140-1

see also anaphora
pronoun resolution: 157n2
suspension of: 56
proposition (definition of): 78
propositional content: 1
R-structures: see rhetorical structure
analysis
reader expectations: 96, 206, 127
reader-response criticisms: 94
reading process: 934
recency theories (of anaphora): see
anaphora, traditional theories of
recursive operation of structures: see
embedding
referential pronouns: 2; see also
pronominalization
referent tracking: 17, 144; see also
participant tracking
referents:
different gender: see anaphora
first mention of: see anaphora and
pronominalization
interfering: see interfering referents
same gender: see anaphora
relative clauses: 78, 132-3
replacing an action: 72-3
resolution: see pronoun resolution
return pop: 27-37, 40-1, 49-56, 58, 60,
75, 102-8, 111, 120-3, 125-7, 130-1,
135, 140, 142, 144, 146-7
hitches in: 56
lexical repetition in: 31-5, 49-56, 59, 60
structural complexity in: 103, 105, 107,
110-11, 120-1, 123, 125-7, 142, 1456
rhetoric: 77
rhetorical organization: 118
rhetorical structure analysis (description):
3-4, 77-92
floating relations: 889
R-structures: 79-87
roles: see syntactico-semantic roles
same gender referents see anaphora
structural analyses: see conversational
analysis; rhetorical structure analysis
syntactic control (of anaphora): 2-3
spoken and written language, comparison:
4, 137-9
syntactic integration: 137
syntactico-semantic roles (in anaphora):
57, 59, 61
text grammars: 159nl

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Subject index
text-types: 1, 138-40
comparability of: 138-9
see also genre
texturing: 77
topic: 139-141
topic continuity: 56, 118; see also
anaphora, traditional theories of
transcripts (of conversations): 6
transcription notation: 6-8

173

turn-taking: see conversational analysis

use (accomplishes context): 16-17, 40, 93,
97-8, 104, 112
validity (of analysis): 91-2
writing process: 93-4, 112, 144, 150
stability of product: 142-3

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