Never Look Back: An Alternative to Centering

I propose a model for determining the hearer's at-tentional state which depends solely on a list of salient discourse entities (S-list). The ordering among the elements of the S-list covers also the function of the backward-looking center in the cem tering model. The ranking criteria for the S-list are based on the distinction between hearer-old and hearer-new discourse entities and incorporate pref-erences for inter- and intra-sentential anaphora. The model is the basis for an algorithm which operates incrementally, word by word.