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Abstract
Because the syntactic and/or thematic salience of a particular discourse referent is relative to that of co-occurring discourse referents, relying on syntactic and/or thematic salience to resolve anaphora is beneficial only when there are competing referents for a given anaphoric reference. Data from a production experiment and a processing experiment suggest that the accessibility of plural discourse referents in Spanish, as measured by form of referring expression, does not necessarily depend on the way in which those referents are constructed within the discourse. Non-split antecedents were found to be no more accessible than split antecedents in the absence of competing plural referents for a given plural anaphoric expression.