This study sets out to provide an explanation for the anaphoric use of the French third person pronoun IL and the demonstrative pronoun CELUI-CI, which are interchangeable in some contexts, but not in others. Its main objective is to uncover the factors which, on the one hand, play a role in the use of both pronouns and, on the other, intervene in their interpretation. The first chapter briefly discusses the merits and shortcomings of five general approaches to anaphora and describes the cognitive-functional approach that will be adopted in the remainder of the work. In the second chapter, earlier studies concerned with IL and CELUI-CI are focused on. The actual analysis kicks of in chapter 3, which starts with a detailed description of the corpus (newspaper articles of Le Monde sur cd-rom) and continues with an original syntactic examination of the pronouns and their respective last mentions (antecedents). Syntactic factors, such as the function of the pronoun and the last mention, as well as the form of the last mention, differ significantly. The main aim of chapter 4 is to verify whether Accessibility Theory (Ariel 1988, 1990, 2001) can account for the use of IL and CELUI-CI. The results of this analysis are harder to interpret, but nevertheless clearly point to the importance of the referent’s more or less salient character (i.e. the number of previous recent mentions). Chapter 5 confirms the hypothesis according to which CELUI-CI generally marks a topic shift and IL topic continuity, at least in main and independent clauses. It reveals, moreover, how several other properties of both pronouns can be explained by this tendency, namely various syntactic observations made in chapter 3, as well as the fact that the demonstrative often refers to the latter of two or more referents mentioned previously. The role of disambiguation is also examined. Chapters 6 and 7 are concerned with the paragraph-initial occurrences and treat their relation with the discourse topic and the discourse structure. Chapter 8, finally, provides a summary of the dependency relations between the various factors that seem to induce the use of either IL or CELUI-CI.
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