Focusing and discourse∗
Candace L. Sidner · Discourse Processes · 1983
In a discourse, speakers center their attention on a particular element of the discourse, and they talk about it over one or more sentences of the discourse. This element is called the focus, and the process by which speakers center is focusing. Focusing is a cognitive process which is active during the interpretation of discourse rather than during the interpretation of isolated sentences. To help the hearer determine how successive sentences are related, the speaker uses anaphora to signal the same focus rather than re‐introducing in each sentence a noun phrase describing the element of discourse under discussion. This paper describes a process model of focusing that specifies what syntactic, semantic, and world knowledge constraints are needed for the hearer to track the speaker's focus in a discourse. The paper illustrates that focusing is a well constrained behavior for speakers, and argues that focusing is a necessary condition for maintaining Grice's maxim of conversation.