This paper aims to assess current theoretical findings on the origin of coordination by salience and suggests a way to clarify the existing framework. The main concern is to reveal how different coordination mechanisms rely on specific epistemic aspects of reasoning. The paper highlights the fact that basic epistemic assumptions of theories diverge in a way that makes them essentially distinctive. Consequently, recommendations and predictions of the traditional views of coordination by salience are, in principle, based on the processes related to the agent’s presumptions regarding the cognitive abilities of a co-player. This finding implies that we should consider these theories as complementary, and not competitive, explanations of the same phenomenon.
It is only the aid of large corpora (several billions of words) that enables us to discover some intuitively and spontaneously followed rules of grammar. Different kinds of ellipsis and non-ellipsis (repetition of a word or a nominal phrase, which - under some conditions - can be omitted) can also be governed by such rules. The corpus findings of sentence structures as (1) Zastavila se a podívala se na hodinky or (2) Zastavila se a podívala na hodinky (She stopped and looked at her watch) have clearly shown that ellipsis as well as repetition is a (strict) rule under specific semantic and syntactic conditions.