Variation in reference assignment processes: psycholinguistic evidence from Germanic languages

Abstract

Referential dependencies for pronouns and reflexives can be established at different linguistic levels. According to the economy hierarchy of dependencies, syntactic dependencies are ‘cheaper’ than semantic dependencies, which are ‘cheaper’ than discourse dependencies. Psycholinguistic research on English and Dutch has shown that the interpretation of reflexives for which discourse operations are needed (i.e., in locative prepositional phrases) is computationally more costly than the interpretation of coargument reflexives that are based on syntactic dependencies only. Similarly, semantic bound variable interpretation has been shown to be less computationally demanding than discourse-based coreference interpretation. The current study investigates these dependencies in German and replicates the finding that semantic bound variable interpretation is cheaper than discourse-based coreference interpretation. In contrast and as predicted by theoretical accounts that postulate a close relationship of the verb and preposition in German that yields chain formation, no difference was found for the reflexives, supporting the idea that reflexives in prepositional phrases in German depend on the same interpretive mechanisms as coargument reflexives, indicating that the underlying syntactic configuration differs from that in other Germanic languages.