Beyond the sentence: Towards a cognitive-linguistic approach to textual reference

Based on the results of a cognitive-linguistic study on associative anaphors, the paper introduces a new approach to textual reference at the interface of lexical semantics and text semantics. Theoretical tools and concepts, particularly semantic frames and concept types, also relevant for follow-up studies on related text-linguistic phenomena, are introduced and discussed. In the corpus-based study presented here, anaphors are systematically identified and manually annotated according to linguistic features yielding reference resolution. Investigating contextual features of associative anaphors in a great number of cases facilitates a fine-grained analysis of anaphoric reference, paving the way to a comprehensive cognitive approach to textual reference