Special Indefinites in Sentence and Discourse

The main goal of this book is to account for the distribution of English indefinite this, German so'n and Romanian pe-marking. These indefinite noun phrases share several characteristics at the semantic and discourse-pragmatic level: they show a strong and robust affinity for particular referential properties, and they are equipped with a discourse structuring potential, which is mirrored in their referential persistence and topic shift potential. The results can be best accommodated in an expectancy-based, forward-looking model of language processing, which assumes that language is predictive as speakers use different signals to indicate to their hearers what to expect next. The experimental studies reported in this book target both local (i.e. between adjacent sentences) and global (i.e. between more than two adjacent sentences) discourse processing to investigate how the anticipation of coreference and topic establishment extends to larger discourse units.