Summary: | Many factors are taken into account when choosing the referential terms. Especially since there may be competition between the referents. Carried out on an extract from the corpus DEMOCRAT, this study aims to examine whether the distance between referring expressions in a reference chain has an effect on the lexical heterogeneity of this reference chain. With regard to these measures, our results show the independence between the narrative genre and the non narrative genre. There is less interdistance and more stability in narrative texts than in non narrative texts. We also show that there is a reverse correlation between interdistance and referential instability according to the textual metagenre. In narrations, the greater the interdistance, the more referential instability is present. Conversely, the greater the interdistance, the less referential instability is present in other texts. This study constitutes a first step towards a better characterisation of the reference chains with consideration of the textual metagenre and of all the referents.
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