Abstract

We investigate the impact of syntactic alternatives on pronoun resolution in ambiguous constructions in English and French. Previous research detected language-specific preferences in pronoun resolution in utterances of the type “The postman met the streetsweeper before he went home”. These preferences have been attributed to the interaction of information structural and syntactic constraints inducing a subject bias on the one hand, and Gricean reasoning processes taking into account alternative syntactic constructions on the other hand. A corpus study of four English and French corpora shows that an alternative construction which takes a subject antecedent (“The postman met the streetsweeper before going home”) is much less frequent in spoken English than French. A Rational Speech Act (RSA) model with corpus frequencies integrated as language-specific costs on the use of each construction makes empirical predictions for pronoun resolution preferences in French and English for sentences with “avant”/“before” which have been tested before but also for sentences with “après”/“after” which have not been tested so far. New experimental data show a very good fit of the model predictions for pronoun resolution preferences in English as well as for the differences in antecedent choices between French and English. However, experimental data showing differences in antecedent choices between French sentences with “après” and “avant” deviate from model predictions, indicating that more factors need to be taken into account. The combination of Bayesian modeling, corpus analyses and experimental data shows that RSA models can make relevant and falsifiable predictions for cross-linguistic variation in processing.

Highlights

  • Based on the results obtained in our corpus study as well as on data from experiments and corpus studies conducted in prior research, we develop and fine-tune Rational Speech Act (RSA) models (Frank & Goodman 2012; Goodman & Stuhlmüller 2013) of the pragmatic inferences at play in the resolution of ambiguous non-reflexive pronouns

  • We tested the hypotheses that pronoun resolution preferences can be derived from Gricean reasoning, and that the relative frequency of a construction has an important effect on how it interacts with this alternative-based reasoning

  • In order to test these hypotheses in an explicit manner, we built Rational Speech Act models of pronoun resolution in English, French and German, where we incorporated alternative relative frequency into the models as costs

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Summary

Introduction

This puzzle can be illustrated by data such as those in (1), from Hemforth et al (2010). A. English: The postman met the streetsweeper before he went home. B. French: Le facteur a rencontré le balayeur avant qu’ il rentre à la maison. C. German: Der Briefträger hat den Straßenfeger getroffen bevor er nach Hause ging. The postman has the streetsweeper met before he home went

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