Experimenting with imposters: what modulates choice of person agreement in pronouns?

Abstract

Imposters are grammatically third-person expressions used to refer to the firstpersonspeaker or second-person addressee (e.g. ‘the present authors’ when used to refer tothe first-person writer, ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy’ when used by parents for self-reference inchild-directed speech). Current analyses of imposters differ in whether they derive theunusual referential properties of imposters using syntactic means or attribute them tosemantic and pragmatics. We aim to shed light on these competing approaches by means of apsycholinguistic experiment focusing on first-person imposters that investigates the kinds ofpronouns (first-person vs. third-person) used to refer to imposter antecedents. Our resultsshow that manipulating the prominence of the first-person speaker does not significantlyboost the acceptability of first-person pronouns in imposter-referring contexts. However, ourresults suggest that a purely syntactic approach may not be sufficient either, aspsycholinguistic processing factors also appear to be relevant.Keywords: person agreement, agreement mismatch, pronoun, imposters, psycholinguistics,accessibility, prominence.