Assignment #5 - Coreferences in Jon Stewart's Opening Monologue

Monk et al. explains that coreferencing expressions are third-person pronouns such as “it,” “that,” “they,” “he” and “she,” which refer back to a given noun. Rather than repeating these noun phrases, a speaker will use these coreferences to be more efficient in message length. More importantly, they are used by the speaker to show that common ground is thought to have been established by the speaker, and that the message can therefore be shortened to get straight to the point.

In Jon Stewart’s opening monologue, he does a brief overview of storylines related to the Academy Awards, while interjecting humor periodically. Since it was his opening lines of the show, I initially expected that they would be used rarely. Furthermore, given that there was humor involved, I decided that perhaps there would be even fewer coreferences because humor relies on everyone understanding what has been said, and the less ambiguity, the more likely the audience will understand the jokes and references. Furthermore, humor in this kind of speech is generally limited to a few sentences, as new topics are constantly being brought up, which I though also would limit coreferences.

I looked at the question, to what extent does Stewart use these coreferences in his opening monologue? I came up with the following numbers:

“it”: 11
“that”: 1
“they”: 1
“he”: 1
“she”: 0
“one”: 0
“him”: 0
“her”: 3
“them”: 2
“himself”: 0
“herself”: 0
“itself”: 0
“his”: 1
“hers”: 0
“its”: 0
“there”: 3
“their”: 2
“theirs”: 0

I found that my predictions were true very much so except for one expression — the word “it.” Stewart almost always used direct speech with pronouns, keeping his comments fairly short and moving topics fairly rapidly, which certainly contributed to his lack of coreferences. In general, he stayed away from them, which I think was a function of this speech being at the beginning of the show, Stewart wanting to be very clear and concise, and Stewart not having material to reference form earlier (as predicted by the interview posting). However, the word “it” was constantly being used, probably because Stewart was describing generalized trends or making general observations fairly often. Otherwise, with almost no exceptions, Stewart referred to actors, pundits and even the democratic party by their actual names, and never coreferenced them even if he was still referring to them in sentence. I believe that this has to do with the function of the speech and the lack of common ground previously established.