Topicality, text structure and anaphoric relations

In this paper, I define and develop the concept of “(textual) anaphora”, i.e. text relations between an anaphor and an antecedent, and I focus particularly on the so-called direct anaphors, viz. the anaphors that designate the same individual entity as the antecedent. My primary attention is on the linguistic material of the anaphors, which fundamentally depends on the antecedent’s pragmatic prominence, i.e. its degree of presence and saliency in the hearer’s mental-cognitive representation, at the moment it is anaphorised. This prominence is based partly on the antecedent’s topicality, which in turn depends on its place in four different semantic, syntactic and referential hierarchies, partly on the text and narrative structure, e.g. the textual distance between antecedent and anaphor, the presence of other possible antecedents, and possible topic changes. The topicality and the text/narrative structure can also be defined as “vertical” and “horizontal” criteria respectively, and as empirical evidence I use a bilingual (Italian – Danish) text corpus as well as other text sources. All examples are translated into English.