Abstrakt
In my conference contribution I would like to present the results of my research from 2013 September. The project was interested in examining co referential chaining in Czech.
The main research question was whether information and constituent structures have any influence on the co-referential chaining in Czech, applying two different perspectives. First of them, the information structure perspective, examined, whether the change of word order with respect to the topic/focus position influences the interpretation of co-referential chains, or not.
In case of the second perspective, the constituent structure, the examined question was whether the change of the subject/object function has any effect on the co-referential constitution. The methodological approach applied to the data was the centering theory (e. g.
Grosz, Weinstein, Joshi, 1995; Walker, Joshi, Friedman Prince, 1998) and František Danešs concept of thematic progressions (e. g. Daneš 1968, 1974).
Following the methodological background I postulated two hypotheses: 1. The tendency towards topic: The topic becomes an antecedent of the pronoun more often than the focus.; 2.
The tendency towards subject: The subject becomes an antecedent of the pronoun more often than the object.