A rethink of the relationship between salience and anaphora resolution

According to prior work on the interpretation of anaphoric elements, the form of linguistic expression used for reference to a discourse entity reflects the entity’s degree of salience. When both fully specified and underspecified forms of reference are available the most underspecified forms are used for reference to the most salient entity. In this paper, we present sentence completion data from Greek, a language whose range of anaphoric expressions includes null subjects and cliticized object pronouns (weak pronominals) as well as demonstrative expressions (strong pronominals). The results of our studies cast doubt on the currently assumed mapping between salience and form of linguistic expression. We found that discourse salience does not warrant the use of the most underspecified form (null subject) in Greek. Semantic focusing (Stevenson et al., 2000) may bring into focus an entity in an object (or other non-subject) position but the choice of antecedent for null or overt forms is senstive to syntactic properties of the antecedent. We argue that discourse salience and choice of referring expression can be sensitive to different properties of discourse entities which may or may not converge depending on the language.