Referential choices. A study on quantification and discourse salience in sentence production in Swedish

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the salience of discourse referents from both a hearer and a speaker perspective in the context of negative quantifying expressions (e.g. not all, few) in Swedish. In three sentence completion studies we investigated what discourse referent is most salient from each of these perspectives and how salience is affected by the syntactic form/semantic type (entity vs. proposition) of the sentence topic in the continuation. We also investigated what morphosyntactic forms are used to refer back to referents of different information structural status. The studies were specifically set up to allow us to distinguish between the two perspectives on salience, unlike previous studies on English, which have only taken hearer-salience into account. The emerging picture of what discourse referent is most salient for negative quantifying expressions is therefore more complex than what previous studies have shown.