Factors Contributing to the Salience of Referents

Verbal communication is a complex phenomenon and one of its central components is referring to entities. A speaker could not utter The dog is barking unless the expression the dog would refer to or would be correlated according to some system to a certain conceptual or physical entity, in this particular case, a dog. When referring, speakers have to choose among a multitude of referential expressions which are arranged on a scale of explicitness or “knowness”, ordered from most definite or determined forms to less specified ones (Bolinger 1977, Givón 1983, Ariel 1990, Birner & Ward 1998, Abbott 2001). For example, when we want to talk about a dog, we could refer to it with different types of referring expressions, ranging from highly elaborated ones, as the dog who suffers from cirrhosis of the liver, to more attenuated ones as Bobi, this dog or even he. Similar referential options can be made in other languages besides English as well, even though the types of referring expressions do not always coincide cross-linguistically. Romanian, for example, uses more clitic pronouns as îl (Masc.Sg.Acc) and o (Fem.Sg.Acc) and zero anaphors where English and German would use strong pronouns.