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On Accessibility and Coreference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Helena Halmari
Helena Halmari
Affiliation:
118 West Fern Avenue, Redlands, CA 92373, USA.
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Abstract

Anaphors and the grammatical roles of their antecedents are examined in Finnish language data in order to establish a correlation between two universal hierarchies: the Keenan & Comrie (1977) NP Accessibility Hierarchy and the hierarchy of accessibility of referential expressions (Accessibility Marking Scale) (Ariel 1985, 1988, 1990). A more or less clear correlation pattern between the type of anaphoric NPs and the grammatical roles of their antecedents arises in Finnish intuition data (Section 2), and this pattern is corroborated by the data from prose text counts (Section 3). Even though a one-to-one mapping between the two hierarchies remains an idealization, it is clear that grammatical relations do bear on the type of anaphoric expression employed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , June 1994 , pp. 35 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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