Basic Resources For Introducing And Tracking People

Martin & Rose (2007: 160-1):

The participant identification resources we’ve been looking at so far are summed up in Table 5.2, with ways of introducing participants on the left and ways of tracking them on the right. 

So on the left we have resources that introduce us to people; and on the right we have resources which tell us who we already know. Technically, we can say that resources that introduce people are presenting reference, and those that track people are presuming reference. Words like a, an and someone are used for presenting reference. Words like the, that, he, we and names like Helena are used for presuming reference.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the presenting reference resources that introduce people (a, an, some) do not function as reference items because, as non-specific determiners, they do not present a recoverable identity. As previously explained, the authors' misunderstanding arises from confusing the deictic function of determiners in nominal groups with the referential function of determiners in cohesion. (The "introduced" person is necessarily the Thing of the nominal group that the determiner, as Deictic, sub-classifies as non-specific.)

[2] To be clear, the presuming reference resources that track people confuse reference in the sense of ideational denotation (Helena) with non-cohesive textual reference (my) and cohesive textual reference (his, he, that, the).

As previously explained, the speaker does not need to keep track of participants because she already knows who she is talking about. This is especially so in the case of my — which Martin & Rose strategically omit from the final sentence — since this refers to the speaker herself.

However, the authors clearly think that the identity at stake is Helena's first love, rather than Helena herself, which demonstrates their confusion of deixis with reference, since the relation between my and first love is deictic, not referential.