The measures of referential distance proposed in Givón (1983) are still to this date the only independent method to quantify textually the degree of accessibility of the discourse entities. Taking into account the ideas presented in Givón (1992), in the paper a new attempt to compute the referential distance of definite NPs is uphold. This new proposal will allow to overcome the difficulties raised by the bid of Givón (1983), which was applied to Spanish by Bentivoglio (1983). The analysis, based on a corpus of Spanish newspaper texts, leads us to the necessity of distinguishing between anaphoric NPs and non-anaphoric NPs when applying the computation, and shows the suitability of a new model of syntactic subcategorization of referential devices.
Topic continuity; Referential distance; Accessibility; Anaphora
