Abstract
It has long been argued that accenting or stressing a pronoun (i.e., making it prosodically prominent) changes its interpretation as compared to its unaccented counterpart. However, recent experimental work demonstrated that this generalization does not apply when the alternative interpretation of the pronoun is not plausible (Taylor et al., 2013). In a series of three experiments that use an offline comprehension task, we show, first, that the lack of reversal is observed when plausibility is controlled for. We furthermore show that a new generalization cannot be formed by excluding cases where the bias towards the unmarked interpretation is strong or cases where the character in the alternative interpretation is low in salience. Instead, we conclude that what constrains the interpretation of accented pronouns is coherence relations, with parallel discourses exhibiting reversal and result discourses not exhibiting reversal. We propose that the difference between coherence relations should be viewed in what would be the minimal change in order to create a ‘surprising’ or expected’ event, which is the characteristic of accenting more generally.
Highlights
Pronouns have received much attention in thelinguistics literature
This serves as further evidence against the generalization, originally due to Akmajian and Jackendoff (1970), that what accenting does to pronouns is reverse their interpretation
3.3 Discussion The current experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that accenting a pronoun will not change its interpretation if the alternative interpretation becomes unavailable when it is strongly dispreferred in the context
Summary
Pronouns (e.g., she, he, it) have received much attention in the (psycho)linguistics literature. The pronoun he in (1b) is ambiguous: it can be interpreted as either of the entities mentioned in prior discourse (i.e., William and Oliver in 1a). In contrast to Taylor et al (2013), the target sentence that contains the critical pronoun is the same for both parallel and result coherence relations (cf 5 above). This allowed us to keep the event described in the target sentence constant across coherence relations, which is important because some verbs could bias more towards parallel or result relations independent of the preceding linguistic context This allowed us to use the exact same token, and the same prosody, across the manipulation; this is important because some prosodic cues preceding or following the pronoun could bias towards one interpretation or another. Because our goal was to dissociate coherence and plausibility, we aimed to create materials where, for both parallel coherence and result coherence, the two possible interpretations of the pronoun would be plausible – we tested the materials to verify this
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