Effects of referential structure on pronoun interpretation

Abstract

ABSTRACTPronoun interpretation is guided by various factors. While most previously-investigated factors involve properties occurring before the pronoun, less attention has been paid to properties of the pronoun-containing clause. We investigate whether pronoun interpretation is influenced by the referential structure of the pronoun-containing clause (i.e. whether another referent from the preceding clause is mentioned), which contributes to discourse coherence. We report three experiments showing referential structure effects: whether subject-position pronouns are ultimately interpreted as referring to the preceding subject or object depends on whether the clause contains another pronoun (e.g. she called Lisa vs. she called her). More specifically, subject-position pronouns exhibit a stronger object preference when only one of the prior antecedents is mentioned, compared to when both are mentioned. We show that this effect is separate from effects of verb semantics and cannot be reduced to semantic or syntactic parallelism effects. Implications for models of pronoun resolution are discussed.