Referential Choices in a Collaborative Storytelling Task: Discourse Stages and Referential Complexity Matter.

ABSTRACT: During a narrative discourse, accessibility of the referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as the discourse unfolds, depending on the presence and prominence of the other referents. This leads the speaker to use various referential expressions to refer to the main protagonists of the story at different moments in the narrative. This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining, or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referential contexts. Referential complexity of the stories was manipulated through variations in the numb

SUBMITTER: Fossard M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5826302 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature