Processing reflexive pronouns when they don’t announce themselves

Abstract

In two experiments we investigated the comprehension of pronoun forms in Chamorro, a verb-initial Austronesian language that does not distinguish morphologically between reflexive anaphors and pronominals. In Experiment 1, on object pronouns, we found that comprehenders had a preference for reflexive interpretations despite the fact that the pronoun form was not morphologically marked as reflexive. In Experiment 2, on possessor pronouns, we found that this preference was much weaker. We conclude that when a morphological distinction between reflexive anaphors and pronominals is absent, comprehenders do prefer to assign reflexive interpretations. However, this pressure is defeasible and moderated by morphosyntactic and semantic factors, such as the competition between null and overt pronoun forms and the verb’s argument structure.