#5 - Language In Conversation: the 78th Annual Academy Awards

In examining the 78th Oscar winners' thank-you speeches, I focused on the frequency of use of coreferring expressions. The question I will answer is this: are all uses of coreffering expression based on the fact that the speaker has already established common ground? I will illustrate my answer with a couple of examples.

In Monk's article about measuring language processes, he defined coreferring expressions as words that "refer to a noun phrase in the previous turn". For example, "it", or "this", or "that", or "they/he/she" can be coreferring expressions. He believes that the use of these expressions makes the message length more efficient, and "may be taken as evidence that the speakers are confident that they have achieved common ground." Well is this the case?

After analyzing several speeches, I found that indeed, the use of coreferring expressions does mean that the speaker has already established the previous noun phrase as common ground. It should be taken into caution that, sometimes "it", "they", "this", etc. may not be used as coreferring expressions. For example, in the beginning of my last sentence, "It should be...", the "it" is not a coreferring expression, that is, the "it" does not refer to something I've said in the previous sentence. But when they are, one can be sure that common ground has already been established.

Example 1: Best Original Score - Gustavo Santaolalla
"I want to thank Ang Lee for his vision, his support, his guidance..."

Here, the coreferring pronoun "his" refers to "Ang Lee's", which Santaolalla has already introduced in the beginning of the sentence. So, common ground has been established, the audience knows that "his" refers to "Ang Lee's" and it's also efficient to say "his" instead of "Ang Lee's" each time, for the three times that he referred to Lee.

Example 2: Best Director - Ang Lee
"...First of all, i want to thank two people who don't even exist. Or I should say, they do exist, because of the imagination of Annie Proulx and the artistry of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Their names are Ennis and Jack. And they taught all of us who made "Brokeback Mountain" so much about not just all the gay men and women whose love is denied by society, but just as important, the greatness of love itself..."

Here, the coreferring pronouns are "they" and "their" which refer to the "two people who don't even exist" and later defined by Lee to be "Ennis and Jack"--the main characters of Brokeback Mountain. The way Lee used coreferring expressions is a little different than the way they were used in the previous example. In this case, Lee defined who "they" are in the first sentence ("two people who don't even exist), then proceeded to modify it ("Ennis and Jack"). In doing so, he also established common ground with the audience and cut time by just referring to "they" in later iterations.