Centering attention in discourse

Abstract

Centering is a set of processes by which people can coordinate their attention during conversation. Speakers signal where their attention is via particular lexical, syntactic and prosodic choices. These choices make discourse entities salient to addressees and may also signal whether speakers expect addressees' attention to be already centered on the same entities. Two questions arise: What linguistic devices do speakers use to make an entity salient in a discourse? And how do speakers re-refer to discourse entities that move in and out of the center of attention? I manipulated speakers' center of attention using a videotaped basketball game. Speakers tended to refer to prominent entities as sentence subjects. When they referred to entities as sentence objects, they were more likely to re-refer next by repeating the full noun phrase verbatim rather than pronominalising. This happened even though both a recency-of-mention strategy and world knowledge would have provided enough information to uniquely identify the referent of a pronoun. When speakers pronominalised entities that had not been centered syntactically, they tended to make them salient prosodically by lengthening the duration of those pronouns.