Els mecanismes de referència en la interfície gramàtica-discurs. Cohesió, coherència i cognició

Abstract

Referential cohesion integrates a series of phoric-type lexical grammatical mechanisms that exhibit syntactic and semantic links between discursive entities. By means of referential devices, textual meanings interweave so that a series of coreferential and meaning networks are created through which nouns are linked in order to contribute to textual cohesion. As a phenomenon that includes pronominalisation, ellipsis or zero anaphora, textual deixis (which essentially materialises in a non-exophoric use of demonstratives) and a variety of lexical cohesion devices (relationships of repetition, reiteration and association), referential cohesion is located at the interface between grammatical and pragmatic-discursive levels. On the one hand, it establishes structural and hierarchical syntactic-semantic relations between sentence constituents; on the other hand, it reveals the degree of activation of discursive entities in the memory of interlocutors and therefore shows evidence of discursive organisation, which licences an interpretation of thematic progression and coherence. Thus, the variety of referential mechanisms is linked to textual cohesion in the microstructural level. It stands as an obvious and tangible trace of coherence relations at the level of macrostructure and allows to track the cognitive processes by which interlocutors interact in order to communicate - the main aim of discourse - at the contextual and pragmatic levels.