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In this article, I undertake a qualitative analysis of third-person direct-object anaphoric reference in a corpus of Brazilian TV evening news programmes. A comparison of my results to previous studies (Bagno 2005, Duarte 1989, Schwenter and Silva 2003) reveals surprising findings in that figures for anaphoric pronouns (both clitics and tonic pronouns), as well as null objects, are extremely low. Instead, lexical NPs and passive constructions are used to establish anaphoric reference.
While the use of lexical NPs to establish anaphoric reference has been analysed before, the use of passive constructions for this purpose has not been previously observed. I argue that the described pattern can be explained when taking into account the audiovisual quality of television combined with an audience design (Bell 1984) that aims to underline the seriousness of quality reporting.
