Türkçe Bilimsel Metinlerde Gönderimsel Bağdaşılık ve Köprü Gönderimi: Merkezleme Kuramı Çerçevesinde Bir Yaklaşım

Abstract

A great deal of research has been concerned with providing more detailed specifications for the parametric aspects (such as 'previous utterance', 'realization' and 'ranking') of Centering Theory. The Centering Theory accounts for the interactions between local coherence and referential choices of referring expressions. It relates differences in coherence to a hierarchy of preferred transition types exhibited in discourse, depending on whether the backward-looking center (Cb) of the previous utterance is realized (referentially identical or preferential) or not in the current utterance (Ui) and whether the Cb is also the most highly ranked entity. Clearly, the identification of Cb is affected by which entities are considered to be 'realized' in an utterance. Following Poesio, Di Eugenio, Stevenson and Hitzeman (2000), the major premise of this paper is that continuous reference to the same entities can not be the only criterion which makes discourses locally coherent. Our findings indicate that in addition to direct realization, considering instantiations of bridging reference, (i.e. an anaphoric expression which refers to an object which was not mentioned before but is somehow related to an object that already lias) as 'realizations' significantly affects the identification of preferred transition shifts and therefore ratings of discourse coherence in a database of 18 scientific texts in Turkish.