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Accessibility Theory applied to French: The case of il and celui-ci
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Annemie Demol
Published/Copyright:
August 24, 2007
Abstract
This paper applies Ariel's (1990) Accessibility Theory to two French anaphors: il and celui-ci. Its aim is to test the hypothesis that pronouns mark a higher degree of accessibility to their antecedents than demonstratives. The four factors, namely distance, saliency, unity and competition, which, according to Accessibility Theory, play a role in the relative accessibility of referents are examined in a newspaper corpus. The results of the analysis partly challenge the claims made by Ariel, as only two parameters, saliency and competition, seem to have an impact on the choice between il and celui-ci.
Keywords: anaphora; accessibility; demonstrative; third-person clitic pronoun; distance; topicality; referential competition
Received: 2006-01-09
Revised: 2006-02-24
Accepted: 2006-07-11
Published Online: 2007-08-24
Published in Print: 2007-06-19
© Mouton de Gruyter – Societas Linguistica Europaea
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Keywords for this article
anaphora;
accessibility;
demonstrative;
third-person clitic pronoun;
distance;
topicality;
referential competition
Articles in the same Issue
- Accessibility Theory applied to French: The case of il and celui-ci
- Hesitation phenomena in the language production of bilingual speakers: The role of working memory
- Force dynamics, fictive dynamicity, and the Finnish verbs of ‘remaining’
- Defining grammatical constructions as a linguistic sign: The case of periphrastic progressives in the Germanic languages
- The syntax of English comitative constructions
- Book Reviews
- Report on the 39th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Bremen, 30 August – 2 September 2006)
- Acknowledgements
- 40th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea 29 August–1 September 2007
- Publications Received
