Assignment #5

I analyzed an interview with Reese Witherspoon, after she won the Oscar for Best Actress. It was a question and answer session, with her at the front, and lots of reporters asking her their individual questions. The question I was trying to answer was whether there were more coreferring expressions used by Reese when answering the posed questions, or more by the interviewers, who have common ground knowledge of her, her movie, and the other questions asked?

The method of measurement was coreferring expressions, discussed in the Monk et al reading. These are expressions like “it,” “she,” and “that” which are used to refer to previous noun phrases. One example from the interview questions was: “And you spoke a lot about your grandmother. Do you think she’d be particularly proud of you?” That “she” is used to refer back to Reese’s grandmother. In Monk’s article, he mentions that these coreferring expressions are often evidence that common ground has been achieved. My question was meant to see whether Reese uses these more to show her understanding of the question, or whether the interviewers use them more to show their understanding of her background in regards to the movie and her answers to the other questions.

Here is a table which shows the data collected from the interviews:

	Question 1	Question 2	Question 3	Question 4	Question 5	Question 6	Question 7
# of coreferring expressions by Reese	0	1	0	1 / 2 (first / second question)	0	0	1 / 1 (first / second question)
# of coreferring expressions by interviewer	0	4	0	6 / 3 (first / second answer)	2	1	0 / 3 (first / second answer)

I found that Reese definitely used more coreferring expressions than the people interviewing her. Most of the time the people asking question didn’t use coreferring expressions; instead, they made sure to use specific phrases so Reese would understand the question. The interviewers were more likely to use coreferring expressions when asking a longer question. Also, they always used them (in my few examples) when they asked a follow up question, to refer to information in her first answer. Reese, however, almost always used coreferring expressions. This was partly because she would reply with long answers, and would use them to refer to things she said earlier in her answer. She also used them to respond to the main subject of the question asked by the interviewers. Although I didn't study many examples, I feel like this trend would continue, and would be supported by more data.