Anaphora in Conversation: Grammatical Coding and Preference Organization

This articles explores some socio-interactional motivations for speakers' use of identificationally overspecified anaphoric expressions, i.e. full NP when pronouns would be possible. A qualitative analysis of empirically occurring conversational data was undertaken, drawing from functionalist approaches to grammar and conversation analytic approach to talk-in-interaction. It shows that the preference organization of talk, and namely the preference for agreement, serves as an organizing principle for speakers' anaphoric choices, affecting their grammatical codings (such as lexical NP) as well as the syntactic construction around them (such as left-dislocations and topicalization). This observation provides empirical support for the idea that the functioning of anaphora in social interaction is not limited to referent tracking and information structure alone, but is fundamentally related to the social organization of talk.