Abstract
Current work on coreference focuses primarily on entities, often leaving unanalysed the use of anaphors to corefer with antecedents such as events and textual segments. Moreover, the anaphoric forms that speakers use for entity and non-entity coreference are not mutually exclusive. This ambiguity has been the subject of recent work in English, with evidence of a split between comprehenders' preferential interpretation of personal versus demonstrative pronouns. In addition, comprehenders are shown to be sensitive to antecedent complexity and aspectual status, two verb-driven cues that signal how an event is being portrayed. Here we extend this work via a comparison across five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). With a story-continuation experiment, we test how different referring expressions corefer with entity and event antecedents and whether verbal features such as argument structure and aspect influence this choice. Our results show widely consistent, not categorical biases across languages: entity coreference is favoured for personal pronouns and event coreference for demonstratives. Antecedent complexity increases the rate at which anaphors are taken to corefer with an event antecedent, but portraying an event as completed does not reach statistical significance (though showing quite uniform patterns). Lastly, we report a comparison of the same referring expressions to refer to entity and event antecedents in a trilingual parallel corpus annotated with coreference.Together, the results provide a first crosslingual picture of coreference preferences beyond the restricted entity-only patterns targeted by most existing work on coreference. The five languages are all shown to allow gradable use of pronouns for entity and event coreference, with biases that align with existing generalizations about the link between prominence and the use of reduced referring expressions. The studies also show the feasibility of manipulating targeted verb-driven cues across multiple languages to support crosslingual comparisons.
Highlights
Work in coreference has focussed primarily on entity coreference, typically between third person personal pronouns and human antecedents
Our results show consistent and gradable biases: participants encountering a personal pronoun are more likely to continue the sentence writing about the entity, while demonstratives prompt more event continuations across all five languages
While it could be hypothesised that the reflexive, which corefers with the entity antecedent by necessity, could prime an entity reading, our results show the opposite direction, with these verbs prompting more event continuations: since no priming can be noted and the inclusion of the reflexive is mandatory in Spanish, we consider these stimuli comparable to those in the other four languages
Summary
Work in coreference has focussed primarily on entity coreference, typically between third person personal pronouns and human antecedents. The use of anaphors to refer to non-human entities has been less studied, especially when the reference is to antecedents that are not entities, such as events or full clauses. Non-entity coreference relations, including events and previous portions of a text in discourse-deixis or metalinguistic description, present both formal and practical challenges. The anaphoric forms that speakers use for different kinds of coreference are not mutually exclusive: sentences (1) and (2) show the demonstrative this referring back to respectively an entity (the wine) and an event (the successful aging of the wine).. 1. The Northern Italian wine aged well. This was one of the best wines I’d ever tasted
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