Link to paper This is the seminal paper on a linguistic theory called centering, which deals with “relationships among focus of attention, choice of referring expression, and perceived coherence of utterances within a discourse segment.” In other words, this theory will tell you why “John has been acting odd. He called up Mike yesterday. He was annoyed by John’s call.” sounds a pretty funny, and what the rules are that govern (or influence) our resolution of pronouns.

The gist of the theory is that each utterance has a “backward-facing center” (the focus of the utterance) and a set of “forward-facing centers,” entities which could potentially become the focus in the next utterance. There are a few rules governing transitions between centers, and their linguistic realization in the utterance, like that if any of forward-facing center is realized as a pronoun, the backward-facing center must also be realized as a pronoun. For example, the following discourse is pretty incoherent because it breaks this rule:

Susan gave Betsy a pet hamster. She reminded her that such hamsters were quite shy. She told Susan that she really liked the gift.

Susan is the backward-looking center in the second sentence, and so likely should be the center in the third sentence. If the third sentence began with “Betsy told her” instead of with “She told Susan,” it would be coherent. But because it breaks the pronoun precedence rule of centering, it sounds really quite bad.

I really like reading linguistics papers. I’ve thought a bit about some aspects of pronoun resolution before (like how I was able to understand that my wife was talking about our son when she out of the blue said, “Did we put his bottle away?”), but reading papers by people who have spent their lives studying this stuff is pretty eye opening. There’s a lot of really cool stuff you can learn about how language works.