Chapter 2. Reference tracking
Reference tracking can be defined as the monitoring of a discourse referent in an ongoing discourse. It has to do with specifying the identity of the referents, in other words, with signalling which referent we are talking about. Consider the two examples below: in (a) the anaphoric pronoun himself can only refer to Martí, so it is clear that the subject and the object refer to the same person; in (b), on the contrary, the pronoun him cannot be used to refer to Martí, but only to refer to any other 3rd person masculine singular individual instead, so it is clear that the subject and the object refer to different persons.
a) Martí saw himself.
b) Martí saw him.
Spoken languages have various means of reference tracking: different types of pronouns, agreement morphology, and switch-reference markers. Similarly, sign languages make use of diverse strategies, each of which are presented in the following sections.