Permanent Reference to Living and Non-Living Things in Written Discourse

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse referential continuity in written discourse. Holding a view that referring to an entity depends on the nature of the entity itself, we analysed reference to animate and inanimate entities separately. One of the characteristics of language is its referential function which helps us not only to identify referents but to refer to them continuously using a wide spectrum of referring expressions from unambiguous noun phrases and repetition to personal pronouns and demonstratives. The efficiency of establishing and maintaining referential continuity is assessed with the ability of readers to identify and track referents in text. The text we used for the analysis is a narrative story in English and Serbian.