Cognitive and Pragmatic-Based Accounts of Definite Referring Expressions

This study demonstrates that a cognitive and pragmatic framework provides a good domain in which to analyze the relationship between deictic and anaphoric phenomena and between the two types of anaphora, because a cognitive account would consider mental representation, while a pragmatic account would consider mutual knowledge. So, within this framework, after analyzing the deictic and anaphoric function of a definite article ‘the’, the distinction between these two types is interpreted in terms of the correlation between context and mental representation systems, using Marshall’s (1992) mutual knowledge and Givon’s (1992, 1995) mental operations of definites. This correlation also leads to clear differences between mental storage references: long-term memory based reference and short-term memory based reference. Then some interaction between these two is required to identify the definite NP anaphora that does not have the explicit antecedent in the previous context.