Many stretches of discourse typically consist of a sequence of distinct events; but many referents recur across events. The tracking of referents contributes to discourse cohesion but is also an element of complex sentence constructions. The most likely (but not necessarily the only) referents to be tracked are the subject referents of the clauses in a complex sentence construction. Hence, the primary distinction in reference tracking constructions is between same-subject (SS) and different-subject (DS) constructions. Balanced constructions may use the standard discourse reference strategy (Chapter 3), or the SS strategy may use a zero subject strategy not used for general discourse reference (conditional discourse reference). Reference tracking constructions may be distinguished such that the SS construction is deranked and the DS construction is balanced (conditional deranking), or both SS and DS constructions are deranked (absolute deranking). If both SS and DS constructions are deranked, but systematically differentiated, then the absolute deranking system is a switch-reference system.
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