Pronominal anaphora resolution in Polish: Investigating online sentence interpretation using eye-tracking

The mechanism of anaphora resolution is subject to large cross-linguistic differences. The most likely reason for this is the different sensitivity of pronouns to the range of factors that determine their reference. In the current study, we explored the mechanism of anaphora resolution in Polish. First, we explored preferences in the interpretation of null and overt pronouns in ambiguous sentences. More specifically, we investigated whether Polish speakers prefer to relate overt pronouns to subject or object antecedents. Subsequently, we tested the consequences of violating this bias when tracing the online sentence-interpretation process using eye-tracking. Our results show that Polish speakers have a strong preference for interpreting null pronouns as referring to subject antecedents and interpreting overt pronouns as referring to object antecedents. However, in online sentence interpretation, only overt pronouns showed sensitivity to a violation of the speaker’s preference for a pronoun-antecedent match. This suggests that null pronoun resolution is more flexible than overt pronoun resolution. Our results indicate that it is much easier for Polish speakers to shift the reference of a null pronoun than an overt one whenever a pronoun is forced to refer to a less-preferred antecedent. These results are supported by naturalness ratings, which showed that null pronouns are considered equally natural regardless of their reference, while overt pronouns referring to subject antecedents are rated as considerably less natural than those referring to object antecedents. To explain this effect, we propose that the interpretation of null and overt pronouns is sensitive to different factors which determine their reference.

Differences between Korean Null Arguments and Korean Overt Pronouns

The ultimate goal is this paper is to provide five pieces of evidence that Korean null pronouns are not semantically and syntactically equivalent to Korean overt pronouns. First, when Korean overt pronouns and Korean null pronouns have the only NP as their antecedent, the truth condition becomes different. Second, when Korean overt pronouns and Korean null pronouns take the even NP as their antecedent, the truth condition becomes different. Third, the Korean overt pronoun ku ‘he’ is associated with its antecedent by coreference, whereas Korean null pronouns are associated with their antecedent by binding. Fourth, Korean overt pronouns yield a strict reading, whereas Korean null arguments induces the strict/sloppy ambiguity. This in turn suggests that Korean null pronouns yield looser interpretations than Korean overt pronouns. Additionally, it is worth noting that Korean overt pronouns induce a definite reading, whereas Korean null pronouns yield indefinite and definite readings. Fifth, Korean overt pronouns and Korean null pronouns are not alike in that the former is sensitive to phi-features (gender, number, and person), whereas the latter is not. This paper argues that Korean null pronouns are not syntactically the equivalent of Korean overt pronouns.

Perspectival factors and pro-drop: A corpus study of speaker/addressee pronouns with creer ‘think/ believe’ and saber ‘know’ in spoken Spanish

This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.

Prosodic effects on pronoun interpretation in Italian

In this paper we offer a prosodic account of some well-known L2 findings relating to discourse requirements on pronouns in null subject languages like Italian. Discourse plays a role in determining when a null or overt pronoun in acceptable: in biclausal sentences, null subjects are strongly preferred when the antecedent is the subject in another clause (-topic shift). Overt subjects, in contrast, imply a change of topic and a preference for non-subject antecedents. Carminati (2002) expresses this as the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH), a processing constraint whereby null pronouns prefer antecedents in Spec IP whereas overt pronouns prefer their antecedents to be elsewhere. Previous methodology used tasks where participants made judgments based on sentences they read to themselves, making it impossible to determine what prosody had been adopted. Our results suggest that there are prosodic effects on pronoun interpretation; hence, prosodic factors should be taken into consideration in future experiments.

Processing pronouns in global discourse context

This study examined the interpretation and processing of third-person pronouns when global discourse context supports a less-salient referent as antecedent of a subject pronoun. In particular, we investigated whether such information cancels a default generalized conversational implicature (GCI) biasing a local subject antecedent interpretation for an English overt pronoun. Eye-tracking data was recorded as participants heard four-sentence mini-stories with one of three Contexts: one biasing the subject of the previous clause as antecedent (SB), one biasing another human referent (OB), and one neutral to biasing either referent. Results showed that looking patterns did not diverge in OB and Neutral conditions until after crucial information tying into the larger discourse context was given in the post-pronoun verb. Strong preferences for non-subject referents did not emerge until after the sentence ended, a time-course consistent with participants calculating and then cancelling a default implicature for a subject antecedent. Meanwhile, discourse context reinforcing the default subject implicature in the SB condition facilitated processing, in terms of less time spent looking at either human referent compared the Neutral condition. Overall, results suggest that upon hearing an overt pronoun, English speakers first calculate a GCI that results in a local subject antecedent interpretation, but that, like all implicatures, this GCI can be defeated by contextual factors.

What does and doesn’t affect L2 overt pronoun production

This study examined corpus data from learners of Japanese whose L1s are English, Korean, and Mandarin (as well as native-speaker Japanese controls), in order to investigate the effect of two separate (but sometimes conflated) potential influences on overt pronoun production in the L2: (i) whether or not the L1 is a topic-drop language (like Japanese), and (ii) the properties of overt pronouns in the L1 compared to those of Japanese. In order to investigate (i), the rate of overt pronoun use in topic/argument position for all three learner groups was tabulated and compared to that of native speakers. In order to investigate (ii), total rate of overt pronoun use in all positions was tabulated, as well as the type of case-/discourse-marking particles that accompanied overt pronouns in each learner group, compared to native speakers. Results show no influence of L1 topic-drop status, but some influence of L1 overt pronoun properties, in the form of (a) interactions between the morphosyntax of pronouns and broader DP/NP structure in the L1 and L2, and (b) shared discourse properties of the overt pronoun in the L1 and L2.

Resolução de pronomes em posição de sujeito em orações completivas na retoma de antecedentes em SNs complexos: estudo comparativo entre Português Brasileiro e Português Europeu

In this study we tested, in EP and in BP, complement clauses with a null or an overt pronoun in subject position that is forced by number agreement to retrieve an antecedent within a complex subject NP in the main clause. With an eye-tracking while reading paradigm, we analysed the impact of structural position on pronoun resolution, investigating if the bias described for null-subject and overt-object pronoun resolution for null subject languages replicates for antecedents with different structural positions: null-NP1, the highest structural entity, and overt-NP2, the lowest structural entity. Moreover, we especially investigate the impact of structural position in BP, where c-command relations are considered to be of great relevance for null subject resolution. Results indicate that structural position impacts on pronoun resolution in the predicted way: null-highest NP, overt-lowest NP. Also, BP results reveal that, not only is the null form more constrained by c-command relations, preferentially referring to the c-commanding antecedent (NP1), but also that the overt pronoun does not show a clear bias also when considering structural position (as does not for syntactic function, as shown in previous studies).