Abstract
AbstractThree experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.
Highlights
From the perspective of language production, pronouns provide an economical way to refer to referents that are in a highly activated state in the mind of the speaker or writer
The d-pronoun, on the other hand, showed a robust preference for the final NP of the last context sentence. This preference for the final NP was modulated by the syntactic function of the referent
For the d-pronoun, the observed pattern is different from the one found in Experiment 1, where the dpronoun showed a preference for the second-mentioned NP
Summary
From the perspective of language production, pronouns provide an economical way to refer to referents that are in a highly activated state in the mind of the speaker or writer. From the perspective of language comprehension, in con-. Pronouns pose a challenge because they often lead to referential ambiguity. How this ambiguity is resolved has been a major topic in psycholinguistic research, with a focus on third-person personal pronouns in English. Anaphorically used demonstrative pronouns, as they are found in languages like Dutch, Finnish or German, have attracted a fair amount of attention, too. Has two demonstratives of this kind, the more formal dieser and the less formal der. In accordance with the literature on German pronouns, we use the term “d-pronoun” to distinguish der from the demonstrative pronoun dieser.
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