Asymmetries between interpretation and production in Catalan pronouns

Laia Mayol

doi:10.5087/dad.2018.201

Abstract

The literature on Romance null-subject languages has often postulated a division of labor between Null and Overt pronouns: Nulls prefer to retrieve an antecedent in subject position, whereas Overts prefer an antecedent in a lower syntactic position (Carminati, 2002). However, recent research on English pronouns (Rohde and Kehler, 2014) has shown grammatical function alone cannot explain pronoun interpretation. According to these models, pronoun interpretation and production are sensitive to different sets of factors and, instead of being mirror images of each other, are related probabilistically in a Bayesian fashion. This paper tests this model with Catalan data from two discourse-completion experiments to study the grammatical and pragmatic factors that affect the interpretation and production of Null and Overt pronouns. Our main result is that both Null and Overt pronouns present asymmetries regarding their interpretation and production: (1) the production of Null pronouns is affected mainly by grammatical factors (they are subject-biased), but their interpretation is also influenced by pragmatic factors (in particular, rhetorical relations), and (2) while Overt pronouns have a strong interpretation bias towards the object, the data indicates that they are not the preferred form to refer to the object.

Highlights

The production and interpretation of referring expressions is essential for successful communication: speakers need to choose one particular way to refer to the entities they want to talk about; hearers need to assign a discourse referent to the referring expressions in a discourse
The author of the paper and a linguistics graduate student at UPF, coded the antecedent of the subject of the completion into one of the following categories: Subject, Object, Joint, Other or Unsure
Discarded were the cases in which a null pronoun was not used in the conditions ICV1+Null and ICV2+Null, which amounted to 0.68% (n=16) of the data

Summary

Introduction

The production and interpretation of referring expressions is essential for successful communication: speakers need to choose one particular way to refer to the entities they want to talk about; hearers need to assign a discourse referent to the referring expressions in a discourse. A longstanding idea is that more reduced anaphoric expressions (such as pronouns) tend to be used for more accessible referents, while more complex expressions will be used to refer to less accessible referents (Ariel, 1990; Givon, 1983; Gundel et al, 1993) This raises the question of which specific factors contribute to accessibility, and whether the same factors drive both production and interpretation. Carminati found support for the PAH in questionnaire and reading-time experiments for Italian In her Experiment 1, participants were presented with two-sentence discourses, in which the second sentence contained a potentially ambiguous Null (see (4-a)) or Overt (see (4-b)). They had to answer a question about the referent of such pronoun (4-c). She found clear opposed biases between Null and Overts: Nulls pronouns preferred to retrieve the antecedent in subject position (‘Marta’ in the examples), and Overts the antecedents in object position (‘Piera’ in the examples)

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Conclusion