The paper develops further the idea of using the notion of the stock of shared knowledge (SSK) for anaphora resolution following a more subtle treatment of the influence of the topic/focus articulation of the sentence on the degrees of salience of items of the SSK. An algorithmic evaluation procedure of the SSK is formulated taking into account the notions of contextual boundness, syntactic associations, complexity of the sentences and existence/nonexistence of possible competitors, and a general evaluating function is proposed, essential for the process of anaphora resolution. In the present paper the analysis is performed for Czech; however, the considerations are claimed to be of a universal validity, the actual relations between different factors and the values, of course, being language-dependent.

The hierarchy of salience of the items of the knowledge assumed by the speaker to be shared by him and by the hearer constitutes one aspect of a dynamic account of discourse (Sect. 1). It is claimed that a representation of this hierarchy is a good support for discourse analysis (reference assignement , Sect. 2) and for discourse production (pronominalization, definite description, Sect. 3).