A major issue in the analysis of discourse patterns is identification of the reference of coreferring expressions in consecutive utterances. The relevant questions may be approached from the viewpoint of the degrees of salience of the referents and of the development of these degrees during a discourse.
We want to show how an account of salience may use the opposition of word tokens (and their underlying counterparts) occurring as contextually bound (in the topic) or non-bound (in the focus).