Anaphoric Resolution and Text Comprehension for Readers of German

In most basic sense, comprehension requires integration of successive discourse elements within a into a coherent conceptual representation. Garrod and Sanford note that integrating textual information accurately involves appreciating relationships between various objects, people, or events mentioned in text (77). Discourse features that clarify or obscure such relationships within texts must be interpreted correctly if comprehension is to be successful. One such discourse feature is anaphora, a common referencing device employed in both spoken and written texts. Anaphora is technically defined by Lust as relationship between a proform, called an (e.g., he, she, or they), and another term called an or coreferent (e.g., John, the little girl, or the old books). Lust states that the interpretation of anaphor is in some way determined by interpretation of antecedent (9). In other words, anaphoric forms are coreferential; they make reference to something else for their interpretation and can not be interpreted semantically in their own right (Halliday and Hasan). Bloom and Hays claim that in addition to being coreferential, anaphora also allows authors to employ semantic variation when referencing previously introduced concepts within a discourse. For example, in sentence John came home late and was very tired, author uses he as an anaphoric alternative for John. In German, anaphoric structures serve essentially same reference variation function as they do in English, as Drosdowski demonstrates: