Referenciation and markers of shared knowledge

Abstract

The goal of this essay is to demonstrate, in three genres of three different discourse domains, how speakers resort in a higher or lower degree to previous knowledge, even if they are only supposedly shared, to reconstruct referents and meanings of the text. The analysis will cover the various recategorizations of objects of discourse made by the reader in deictics, referential introductions and in direct and indirect anaphors. It is assumed as in Apothéloz and Pekarek-Dohler (2003), and already recognized in former works (cf. CAVALCANTE, 2011) that the referent is not introduced and is not always kept in the text only by explicit referential expressions. Hence it will be discussed how the reconstruction of those referents not explicitly given on the text surface is confirmed by resorting to more complex inferential mechanisms, and how it is always guided by structural tracks.