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<Paper uid="P98-1090">
  <Title>Long Distance Pronominalisation and Global Focus</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="550" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Motivation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We call LONG-DISTANCE PRONOMINALISATIONS those cases of pronoun use in which the antecedent of the pronoun does not occur either in the same sentence as the pronoun or in the immediately preceding one, but further back in the text. These cases are thought to be rare on the basis of studies such as (Hobbs, 1978), which found that 98% of pronoun antecedents in the corpus analysed were in the same sentence as the pronoun or the previous one.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> However, our analysis of a small corpus of oral descriptions of museum items collected for the ILEX project (Hitzeman et al., 1997) revealed that long-distance pronouns are much more common in this kind of data -four times as common, in fact: out of a total of 83 pronouns, 7 (8.4%) were long-distance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The typical pattern of long-distance pronominalisation in the ILEX dialogues is shown in (1), where the pronoun him in the last sentence refers to the jeweller, mentioned most recently two sentences ear- null lier.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> JO: Okay, thank you. Shall we look at the object in case number 16, number 1 ? There's a set of three objects here.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> LG: 1. Yes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> 2. What these symbolise for me are one of the preoccupations of the 1980s, which is recycling.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 3. The jeweller who made these bangles was particularly interested in the idea of using intrinsically worthless material- material that had been thrown away, old junk- and he lavished on those materials an incredibly painstaking and time-consuming technique, so that the amount of time put into the labour of making these jewels bears absolutely no relation to the value of the materials that he's used.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> 4. And if you look at, for instance, the bangle at the  bottom- that's the blue and red one- what looks as though it's painted decoration is in fact inlaid; it's bits of cut-off razor-blade, biro, knitting needles, inlaid into layer after layer of resin, which is done in emulation of Japanese lacquer technique.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> 5. And that particular bangle took hhn something like 120 hours of work.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> All 7 long-distance pronouns in the ILEX dialogues we have studied refer to discourse entities introduced in background text in this way.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> Unlike Sidner's theory of focus (Sidner, 1979), the theory of the attentional state in (Grosz and Sidner, 1986) (henceforth: G&amp;S) does not include explicit provision for long-distance pronominalisations, although some of the necessary tools are potentially already there, as we will see. The component of the theory that deals with pronominal reference, centering theory (Grosz et al., 1995), only accounts for cases in which the antecedent of a pronoun is introduced by the previous sentence; cases such as (1) have to be handled by different mechanisms. In this paper we look the phenomenon of long-distance pronominalisation in some detail, examining data from different domains, and consider  its implications for G&amp;S's theory.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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