Anaphora resolution in L1 Greek

Abstract

By means of an annotated corpus of 13,085 words, this paper investigates discourse-level anaphora in L1 Greek, exploring the anaphoric preferences of referring expressions in subject position and the effect of several factors on antecedent prominence. Longer referential forms are supposed to signal low accessibility, whereas shorter ones tend to be linked to more salient discourse elements. Moreover, antecedent saliency appears to be influenced by syntactic position, sentential/discourse topichood, recency and rhetoric relations between utterances (Right Frontier Constraint). The results of the study indicate that, although the use of null pronominals is the default option in Greek, the ‘second-in-command’ anaphoric expression is the full DP and not the overt pronoun. Furthermore, null pronouns significantly prefer to refer to salient antecedents.