Abstract
Personal pronouns and demonstratives contribute differently to the encoding of information in the mental model and they serve distinct backward- and forward-looking functions. While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent discourse entity (backward-looking function) and typically mark the maintenance of the current topic, demonstratives are used to refer to a less prominent entity and serve the additional forward-looking function of signaling a possible topic shift. In Experiment 1, we present an ERP study that examines the time course of processing personal and d-pronouns in German (er vs. der) and assesses the impact of two prominence features of the antecedent, thematic role and sentential position, as well as neurophysiological correlates of backward- and forward-looking functions of referential expressions. We tested the comprehension of personal and d-pronouns following context sentences containing two potential antecedents. In addition to the factor pronoun type (er vs. der), we varied the verb type (active accusative verbs vs. dative experiencer verbs) and the thematic role order (canonical vs. non-canonical) in the context sentences to vary the antecedent's prominence. Time-locked to pronoun-onset, the ERPs revealed a general biphasic N400-Late Positivity for d-pronouns over personal pronouns with further subtle interactions of the prominence-lending cues in the early time window. The findings indicate that the calculation of the referential candidates' prominence (backward-looking function) is guided by thematic role and positional information. Thematic role information, in combination with initial position, thus represents a central predictor during referential processing. Coreference with a less prominent entity (assumed for d-pronouns) results in processing costs (N400). The additional topic shift signaled by d-pronouns (forward-looking function) results in attentional reorienting (Late Positivity). This is further supported by Experiment 2, a story continuation study, which showed that personal pronouns trigger topic maintenance, while d-pronouns yield topic shifts.
Highlights
When a language makes available different forms to refer to entities in the world, these forms typically indicate discrete cognitive states in the mental representation of the interlocutors
What is prominence? In the literature on pronoun resolution many different factors have been discussed as prominence-lending cues and in the following we provide a brief overview over possible candidate features assumed in the processing literature
In particular the pattern observed for the personal pronoun in the non-canonical active accusative constructions is surprising but it emulates the exceptional role of this condition in Experiment 1, where we argued that the fact that neither proto-agent nor subject are aligned with the first position interferes with prominence computation
Summary
When a language makes available different forms to refer to entities in the world, these forms typically indicate discrete cognitive states in the mental representation of the interlocutors (cf. Gundel et al, 1993). While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent entity in the current discourse, demonstrative pronouns are used to refer to a less prominent entity or exclude the most prominent entity (cf Comrie, 1997). Personal pronouns signal the maintenance of the current topic, while demonstratives suggest that the respective referent is likely to be promoted to topic status in subsequent discourse and indicate a topic shift (cf e.g., Abraham, 2002). This is what we call the “forward-looking function.”
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