نبذة مختصرة : International audience ; There is a major difference of opinion within both Linguistics and Psycholinguistics concerning the limits beyond which it is impossible for an unaccented 3 rd person pronoun to retrieve a given referent. For Erkü & Gundel (1987), Sanford & Garrod (1981) and Sanford et al. (1983), this is impossible or highly marked when the referent is implicit, rather than explicitly introduced via a textual antecedent. However, others (Walker & Yekovitch, 1987: Experiment 1, Yule, 1979, 1982, Cornish, 1999: §6.5, to appear a.) maintain that this is possible when the referent is central within the discourse representation currently in focus at the point when the pronoun occurs in a text. We suggest that both sides in the debate may be correct, in that while peripheral implicit referents evoking the means or the instrument whereby a given state of affairs is established are not targetable via such indexical forms (or are only so with difficulty), central or ‘nuclear’ implicit referents are. We put this hypothesis to the test in two experiments, involving different languages (English and French). The results of each were very similar, and indicated the existence of an interaction between the explicit vs. implicit character of the antecedent references and the central vs. peripheral nature of the referents concerned. Finally, these results are interpreted in the light of Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski’s (1993, 2000) Givenness Hierarchy.
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