Resumen de On the cognitive status of antecedents in Spanish discourse anaphora
As anaphoric elements, demonstrative are widely used by speakers to refer to first, second and third order (intensional) entities. In this sense, demonstratives are said to co-refer with individuals, events, situations and propositions thus greatly contributing to discourse cohesion. For some authors, the distinctive behavior of referential expressions like demonstratives, definite, indefinite articles, etc. lies in their capability to "mark" the cognitive status of their antecedents. Thus, for example, demonstratives (this/that) would differ from the neuter pronoun (it) in that the former mark their antecedents as cognitively activated vs the cognitive status in-focus of the latter. This paper focuses on Spanish demonstratives and the theoretical notion of cognitive status and argues in favor of a reconsideration of the status activated for these elements in Spanish based on empirical data from a corpus study that analyzes the factor "recency of mention of the antecedent" as a determining factor
