Centering theory and the Italian pronominal system

In this paper, I give an account, in terms of centering theory (GJW86), of some phenomena of pronominalization in Italian, in particular the use of the null or the overt pronoun in subject position. After a general introduction to the Italian pronominal system, I will review centering, and then show how the original rules given in (GJW86) have to be extended or modified. Finally, I will show that centering does not account for two phenomena: first, the functional role of an utterance may override the predictions of centering; second, a null subject can be used to refer to a whole discourse segment. This latter phenomenon should ideally be explained in the same terms that the other phenomena involving null subject are. 1 The Italian pronominal system In Italian, there are two pronominal systems, characterized by a different syntactic distribution: weak pronouns, that must always be cliticized to the verb (e.g. la, lo, li, le respectively her, accusative; him, accusative; them, masculine, accusative; them, feminine, accusative or her, dative), and strong pronouns (lui, lei, loro respectively he or him; she or her; they or them). The null subject can be considered as belonging to the system of weak pronouns. Notice that in Italian there is no neuter gender: nouns referring to inanimate objects are masculine or feminine. The weak pronouns used in this case are those of the corresponding gender, while, when a strong pronoun has to be used, paraphrase or deictics are preferred. A strong pronoun for inanimate objects ∗This research was supported by DARPA grant no. N0014-85-K0018. does exist esso for masculine, essa for feminine, but it is not much used in current Italian. Weak and strong pronouns are often in complementary distribution, as the following example shows the contrast is between the use of the null or overt pronoun in subject position : Ex. 1 a) Quando Carloi ha incontrato Marioj , When Carloi has met Marioj , φi/∗j non gli∗i/j ha nemmeno detto “ciao”. hei/∗j not to-himi/∗j has even said “hi”. b) Quando Carloi ha incontrato Marioj , When Carloi has met Marioj , lui∗i/j non glii/∗j ha nemmeno detto “ciao”. he∗i/j not to-himi/∗j has even said “hi”. Notice the difference between sentences a and b: in a the null pronoun in subject position refers to Carlo and therefore gli has to refer to Mario; in b reference is switched. The overt pronoun lui in subject position requires its referent to be Mario, and therefore gli has to refer to Carlo. There are some syntactic accounts of coreference phenomena in Italian, for example Calabrese’s (Cal86). He starts from the observation that weak pronouns are used in all those contexts in which there is an expected referent for the pronoun itself; he claims that we cannot use strong pronouns in place of weak ones, and vice versa . To formalize the concept of expected referent, he resorts to the notion of Thema, defined as the subject of a primary predication, where x is a primary predicate of y iff x and y form a constituent which is either θ−marked or [+INFL]. φ indicates a null subject and can be translated as an unstressed pronoun in English. In all the examples I will be using, if a proper name ends in -o or -i, it has a male referent; if it ends in -a, a female referent. The translations I provide are literal and generally word by word. Actually Calabrese classifies pronouns as unstressed / stressed, and not as weak / strong, but I think his terminology may lead the reader to a wrong conclusion. In fact, while the “unstressed” pronouns can never be stressed, the “stressed” pronouns can, but not necessarily are. He then says that a pronoun in position of Thema is expected to have another Thema as antecedent, and that if this coindexing occurs, the pronoun must be a weak one. Through these definitions and rules he manages to account for a wide range of data, as far as single sentences are concerned, but when he tries to extend them to discourse, their usefulness and predictive power is not sufficient, and sometimes they give the wrong prediction. This is partly due to his very simplistic view of discourse, which he considers as a conjunction of sentences. Even for those sentences in which this view is sufficient, the argument that coreference depends only on the syntactic structure of the discourse and that we cannot use a weak pronoun when the theory predicts that a strong one is expected does not hold. Consider the following example: Ex. 2 D1) a) Ieri Carloi ha incontrato Marioj . Yesterday Carloi has met Marioj . b) φi/∗j Non gli∗i/j ha nemmeno detto “ciao”. Hei not to-himj has even said “hi”. D2) a) Ieri Carloi ha incontrato Mariaj . Yesterday Carloi has met Mariaj . b) φ∗i/j Non glii/∗j ha nemmeno detto “ciao”. Shej not to-himi has even said “hi”. Calabrese’s analysis correctly explains the allowed and disallowed coreferences in D1: Mario is not the Thema of D1.a. So, if we want to have the subject of D1.b refer to Mario, we cannot use a weak pronoun, but we have to use a strong one: in fact, if we do use a null subject, it is interpreted as referring to Carlo. Let’s now consider D2. The structure of the two discourses is exactly the same. Therefore the theory predicts that, if we want to refer to Maria, which is not the Thema of D2.a, we have to use a strong pronoun, and not a null one: instead, D2.b is almost perfect. The reason is that in D2.b the null subject has two potential referents, one male and the other female. While processing the sentence, the possibility that the null subject refers to Carlo is ruled out when the clitic gli, marked for masculine, is found. In fact, gli has to refer to Carlo; given that gli is not reflexive, it cannot corefer with the subject, therefore the latter is forced to refer to Maria. This kind of disambiguation cannot be performed in D1.b, in which the null subject has two potential referents of the same gender. I should mention that Calabrese, at the beginning of his paper, says that such features [gender, number and person] allow a first selection among the possible referents which are assigned to the pronominal. Presumably he would use these features as a superimposed filter to be applied to the whole sentence after it has been completely read or heard. However, this could hardly fit in a model of how people process discourse: it is very likely that the normal human mode of operation is incremental (Ste89). My claim is that disambiguation clues have to be taken into account as soon as they are available while processing a sentence. We will see in fact that they can help to make a discourse coherent or not according to their position in the sentence. Notice that the issue here is to account not so much for the grammaticality or ungrammaticality of a sentence, as pure syntactic accounts do, but for more or less coherence in a discourse: this is exactly the purpose of centering theory. In particular, centering relates discourse coherence with the inference load that a certain sequence of utterances, and especially a certain choice of referring expressions, requires on the part of the hearer. In the next section, I’ll show how centering theory can be useful to explain certain uses of Italian pronouns in discourse, and in turn, how a richer pronominal system can help to refine the rules that centering uses.