Abstrakt
My research considers methods of constructing the meaning of the coreferential chains in Czech from the perspective of Centering Theory (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein 1995); (Brennan, Friedman and Pollard 1987) etc. I tested the contexts of two sentences under several conditions: The first sentence contained two noun phrases.
The second one contained a pronoun (possessive or personal). I checked two possible factors: the information (Topic Focus articulation) and the constituent structure (Subject Object function).
Almost 300 respondents participated in the survey and chose the appropriate antecedent for the pronoun within the time limit of 20 seconds. The results show that information and constituent structures were the key factors: the Topic and the Subject parts of the utterances are preferred as antecedents of the pronouns.
Of course, there are additional factors to be considered: used lexical representation, respondents' individual experience or the fact that the coreferential unspecificity at a purely language level is quite common in the communication.