Reference chains in narrative medieval texts: generic features and variations

This contribution aims at exploring and identifying the specific features of reference chains in Old French. We have therefore annotated reference chains for human characters in four extracts of religious narrative texts written in verse and prose in the 12th and 13th centuries. The analysis shows that cognitive theories of salience or of referential accessibility are not always sufficient to explain how reference chains are built in our corpus. To analyse their features, the genre of the text and the narrative structure must also be taken into account, as well as the distinction between local salience, which is linked to the occurrence context, and more global salience, which is attached to the whole text.