![]() ![]() The preferred antecedent is the object for a subject-experiencer verb but the subject for an object-experiencer verb. As an example, compare sentence (5-a) with a subject-experiencer verb to sentence (5-b) with an object-experiencer verb (from Stevenson et al. 1994 Fukumura and Van Gompel 2010 Kehler and Rohde 2013). The most prominent notion in this regard is the notion of implicit causality introduced by Garvey and Caramazza ( 1974) (see also, e. g. Semantic biases reflect hearers’ and readers’ efforts to assign coherent interpretations to what they hear or read. In addition to “structural biases”, pronoun resolution is subject to “semantic biases”, to use a term from Fukumura and Van Gompel ( 2010). Similarly, the sentence topic is not necessarily the first NP in a sentence. For context sentences with object-before-subject (OS) order, syntactic structure and linear structure make different predictions, in contrast to subject-before-object (SO) context sentences as in the example above. #German grammar personal pronouns freeDue to the relatively free word order of German, a sentence can also start with the object instead of the subject. In example (1), the three relevant dimensions – syntactic, linear, and information structure – are conflated, but this is not always the case. Fukumura and van Gompel 2015 Portele and Bader 2016). For the d-pronoun, the opposite holds its preferred antecedent is typically the object, sentence-final, and a non-topical referent (e. g. ![]() Numerous studies have shown that the typical antecedent of a p-pronoun is a subject, occurs sentence-initially, and is the sentence topic. In German discourses as in (1), intuitions as well as experimental results, reviewed below, show that the p-pronoun er preferentially takes the subject as its antecedent whereas the preferred antecedent of the d-pronoun der is not the subject but the object of the prior sentence.Ī personal pronoun prefers a topic, a d-pronoun prefers a non-topic as antecedent. We focus on the contrast between p- and d-pronouns in the following, but come back to the difference between the two demonstratives in Section 5. For personal pronouns, we use the abbreviation “p-pronoun”. In accordance with the literature on German pronouns, we use the term “d-pronoun” to distinguish der from the demonstrative pronoun dieser. German, in fact, has two demonstratives of this kind, the more formal dieser and the less formal der. More recently, anaphorically used demonstrative pronouns, as they are found in languages like Dutch, Finnish or German, have attracted a fair amount of attention, too. How this ambiguity is resolved has been a major topic in psycholinguistic research, with a focus on third-person personal pronouns in English. From the perspective of language comprehension, in contrast, pronouns pose a challenge because they often lead to referential ambiguity. The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.įrom the perspective of language production, pronouns provide an economical way to refer to referents that are in a highly activated state in the mind of the speaker or writer. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. ( 2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. ![]()
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