Effects of Contrast on Referential Form: Investigating the Distinction Between Strong and Weak Pronouns

Abstract

To further our understanding of the nature of the form–function mapping in anaphoric paradigms, this study investigated the referential properties of strong pronouns (long pronouns) in Estonian. Cross-linguistically, 2 main accounts of the long–short distinction have been proposed: the salience account (long pronouns refer to less salient antecedents) and the contrast account (long pronouns refer to entities that are being mentioned contrastively). To test these claims, this study compared parallel corpora of Estonian and Finnish to see how Estonian long pronouns are realized in Finnish and what the grammatical role of the antecedent is. Building on Pajusalu (1997), this study also analyzed the referential properties of long pronouns from the perspective of alternative semantics (Rooth, 1992) and Jackendoff's (1972) and Büring's (2003) research on contrast. The corpus patterns support the contrast account, indicating that the long–short distinction cannot be straightforwardly reduced to referent salience. As a whole, these results fit with the form-specific multiple-constraints approach to reference resolution (Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008).