ACCESSIBILITY AND PROMINENCE IN A NETWORK THE CONSTRUCTION OF REFERENTS “HE(THEY)” IN ARMANDINHO COMIC STRIPS

THE CONSTRUCTION OF REFERENTS “HE(THEY)” IN ARMANDINHO COMIC STRIPS

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate the construction of the accessibility of implicit referents, identified by the pronoun “he/s”, without an antecedent or without a direct anchor, through prominence factors observed in the referential networks of the comic strips featuring the character Armandinho. In view of this, we rely not only on authors from Textual Linguistics, such as Matos (2018a; 2018b) and Cavalcante et al. (2022), who propose the notion of referential networks from a socio-cognitive perspective, and Costa (2007), who applies the notion of accessibility to the analysis of referenciation;but also in authors of Pragmatics, such as Ariel (1988; 1996; 2001), whose Accessibility Theory is adapted to the discursive prominence approach of Von Heusinger and Schumacher (2019 ), as a dynamic, attractive and relational phenomenon. We used a descriptive-explanatory approach in order to observe the probable contribution of certain prominence factors to the mental activation of implicit referents in the network. We analyzed a sample of ten (10) comic strips, but we bring to the discussion two (2) representative examples, whose analyses emphasize the clues of concession of referential prominence by topicality, by non-competitiveness, by attractiveness in anchoring relations and by encyclopedic givenness. Thus, we point out that the relational analysis of referents in a network, not only by linguistic form, but by prominence clues that include encyclopedic factors, may be a fruitful means of analyzing accessibility, especially that of implicit referents in the texts.