UNHERALDED PRONOUNS AND MANAGEMENT BY COMMON GROUND

Pronouns are unheralded when they appear without an explicit anteceden t in the immediate context. Speakers use such pronouns when they belie ve, by virtue of common ground with an addressee, that a referent is i mplicitly in the focus of attention. In a series of three experiments, we use unheralded pronouns to demonstrate the waxing and waning of th e accessibility of discourse referents as a function of common ground. Subjects read stories in which two characters initially discussed a t hird (target) character. We show that, as the original two characters were separated and reunited, subjects became slower and faster to reco gnize a word that referred to the target character. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.