Unheralded Pronouns and Management by Common Ground

Abstract

Pronouns are unheralded when they appear without an explicit antecedent in the immediate context. Speakers use such pronouns when they believe, by virtue of common ground with an addressee, that a referent is implicitly in the focus of attention. In a series of three experiments, we use unheralded pronouns to demonstrate the waxing and waning of the accessibility of discourse referents as a function of common ground. Subjects read stories in which two characters initially discussed a third (target) character. We show that, as the original two characters were separated and reunited, subjects became slower and faster to recognize a word that referred to the target character.