On the role of the hierarchy of activation in the process of natural language understanding

Abstract

The elements of the stock of knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer change their salience, in the sense of being immediately accessible in the hearer's memory. The hierarchy of salience is argued to be a basic component of a mechanism serving for the identification of reference. Some of the regularities of this mechanism are discussed, the description of which is a necessary prerequisite of an automatic understanding of connected texts.