On pronouns in Catalan and game theory

The goal of this paper is to explore whether game theory can account for the distribution of pronouns in Catalan, a null-subject language. I extend the game-theoretical account proposed by Clark and Parikh (2006), which uses games of partial information to account for anaphora production and resolution in English. Their proposal needs to be extended to account for the fact that null-subject languages make extensive use of null pronouns in subject position, apart from overt pronouns, proper names and definite descriptions. The main idea is that speaker and hearer choose the most efficient strategy with the highest payoff, given the type of entity they want to refer to (more or less salient) and the kind of information they want to convey. Game theory provides an elegant framework to capture anaphora production and resolution, by giving payoffs to each option and probabilities to information states. However, anaphora production and resolution in Catalan constitute a challenge for this type of approach. While this approach elegantly captures the use of an overt pronoun to mark a special information structure, its use in intrasentential anaphora situations is more problematic to model.