Pronouns as referential devices in Estonian, Finnish, and Russian

Abstract

This study examines the usage of different anaphoric referential pronominal expressions in three areally close languages: Estonian, Finnish, and Russian. It focuses on the linguistic factors that influence the choice of referential pronominals in spoken narrative discourse, and the relative importance of these factors in languages. We used a picture-sequence based narrative elicitation method to collect a comparable and consistent dataset for these three languages. The data is analyzed using non-parametric conditional inference tree and random forest models. The analysis shows that while the usage frequency and contexts of demonstrative pronouns show large variation in these languages, there are also devices (e.g., personal pronouns and zero reference) that act in a very similar way. There are three significant linguistic factors that influence the choice of referential devices in Estonian, Finnish, and Russian: (i) syntactic role, ii) case of the referential noun phrase, and iii) the referential distance with the previous mention. However, their exact effect, as well as the importance of other factors, varies across languages. These findings support previous research that whilst referential devices have similar grammatical labels (e.g., demonstrative pronouns and personal pronouns) in languages, their actual functions should be analyzed with respect to the specific system of the language.