Pragmatic relativity: Gender and context affect the use of personal pronouns in discourse differentially across languages

Speakers need to use a variety of referring expressions (REs) (e.g. full noun phrases, pronouns or null forms) in pragmatically appropriate ways to produce coherent narratives. Languages, however, differ from each other in terms of a) whether REs as arguments can be dropped or not and b) whether personal pronouns encode gender or not. Here we examine two languages that differ from each other in these two aspects and ask whether the co-reference context (i.e., referents are maintained or re-introduced) and the gender encoding options affect the use of REs differentially. We elicited narratives from Dutch and Turkish speakers about two types of three-person events, one including people of the same and the other of mixed-gender. Speakers of both languages followed a general principle of using full forms such as noun phrases (NPs) while re-introducing a previously mentioned referent into the discourse and reduced forms (overt or null pronoun) while maintaining the same referent; a language independent strategy in discourse production. Turkish speakers, unlike Dutch speakers, used pronouns mainly to mark emphasis. Furthermore, Dutch but not Turkish speakers used pronouns differentially across the two videos. Thus, we argue that linguistic possibilities available in typologically different languages might tune speakers into taking different principles into account to establish coherence in narratives in pragmatically coherent ways.