Reflection: Anaphoric and other referring expressions – their variation across English written registers

Biber et al. (1998: chapter 5) explore the usage of referring expressions, particularly anaphoric expressions, across different registers, using the corpus-based methodology (see also Biber et al. 1999: 237–240, for similar findings). More specifically, they examine referring expressions (noun phrases and pronouns) across two spoken registers, conversation and public speeches (though we will not report the results of public speeches here) from the London-Lund corpus, and two written registers, news reportage and academic prose, from the LOB corpus. They found an uneven distribution of referring expressions. News reportage had the largest number (63 per 200 words), then conversation (61) and finally academic prose (51). To understand these differences better Biber et al. then looked at the distribution according to type of referring expression, retrieving frequencies across the registers for exophoric pronouns, anaphoric pronouns and anaphoric nouns. They discovered that exophoric referring expressions made up over half of the referring expressions in conversation, whereas they were almost non-existent in the written registers, news and academic prose. Those written registers were dominated by anaphoric nouns. In other words, people, not surprisingly, regularly refer to aspects of their immediate extralinguistic context in conversation, whereas in the written registers they refer to aspects of the (previous) text.

They also looked at the average distance between the referring expression and the antecedent in the various registers (the distance was defined as the number of intervening noun phrases). Some large differences emerged. The averages are: conversation (4.5), academic prose (9.0) and news reportage (11.0). That referring expressions occur much closer to their antecedents in conversation can be partly explained by the fact that conversation is conducted online with all the mental processing pressures that implies – referring expressions with short distances to their antecedents are easier to understand. But this finding is also a consequence of the referring expression type. Exophoric referring expressions do not have intervening textual material: they refer directly to their referents.