| Studies about anaphoric expressions have been conducted in a number of languages (Clancy 1980, Givón 1983, Hara 2001, Cole et al 2007, Liu 2010, to name but a few). However, so far there has not been much work devoted to the same work in Indonesian. This study aims to describe the anaphoric distribution of two protagonist animate referents in a silent six-minute film entitled The Pear Stories (Chafe 1980). A total of 82 undergraduate and graduate Indonesian students were asked to watch the film and then retell the story by writing a narrative about the film in Indonesian. Findings indicate that when the protagonist animate referents are mentioned for the first time, a classifier seorang ‘a person‘ is always used before the NP. When they are reactivated, they are mostly expressed by pronouns dia or ia ‘he‘, zero, clitic –nya ‘his‘ or ‘him‘, NPs with demonstrative determiners ini ‘this‘ or itu ‘that‘, NPs with determiner tersebut ‘aforementioned‘, NPs with relative clauses, and NPs with definite articles si or sang ‘the‘ which are often used in fables or tales. Unlike in spoken Indonesian (Sukamto 2003), anaphoric demonstrative pronouns are not found in this written narrative data. This study also demonstrates that choice of the anaphoric expressions of the protagonists is determined by factors such as referential distance and referential interference. Pronouns, zero, NP + determiners, and clitic –nya are used when the protagonist referent is continuous. When there is an interfering referent, the protagonist referents are often referred to as NPs with relative clauses or with si or sang. This study confirms other cross-linguistic studies about anaphoric choices – that there is a correlation between topic continuity and anaphoric expressions in discourse. |