Text Structure and Referential Choice in Narrative

What is it about?

This article addresses the issue of referential choice in Latin, more in particular the anaphoric use of the demonstrative pronoun ille (‘that’, ‘that one’). Ille is usually considered as a relatively ‘heavy’ anaphoric device, which is typically used in environments of participant interference and topic discontinuity, i.e. in cases of problematic accessibility. On the basis of a corpus of Classical Latin narrative texts, it will be argued that this is too simplistic a view, and that in order to explain a considerable number of ‘deviant’ instances of ille, it is necessary to take not only the linear structure of the text into account, but also the global, hierarchical discourse structure. In this context the article will focus especially on the type of structure that is imposed on a text by the alternation of so-called discourse modes. More in general, it shows how ille’s specific deictic value of ‘remoteness’ can be traced in all of its anaphoric uses.

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