Refining Salience and the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis: a Study of Catalan Pronouns
نویسنده
چکیده
Introduction: This paper presents an experiment that investigates which factors govern the referring preferences of two types of subject pronouns in Catalan: null pronouns, with no phonological content, and overt pronouns, which carry gender and number features. Since it is generally assumed that the more reduced an anaphoric expression is, the more salient its antecedent will be (Ariel, 2001), the results of the experiment also contribute at defining which factors compose salience. The results support a multiple-factor model of salience, in which grammatical as well as pragmatic function play a role.
منابع مشابه
Constraints on Donkey Pronouns
This paper reports on an experimental study of donkey pronouns, pronouns (e.g. it) whose meaning covaries with that of a non-pronominal noun phrase (e.g. a donkey) even though they are not in a structural relationship that is suitable for quantifier-variable binding. We investigate three constraints, (i) the preference for the presence of an overt NP antecedent that is not part of another word,...
متن کاملInterpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution
Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual-world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the antecedent Finnish pronouns and demonstratives are mo...
متن کاملA rethink of the relationship between salience and anaphora resolution
According to prior work on the interpretation of anaphoric elements, the form of linguistic expression used for reference to a discourse entity reflects the entity’s degree of salience. When both fully specified and underspecified forms of reference are available the most underspecified forms are used for reference to the most salient entity. In this paper, we present sentence completion data f...
متن کاملEffects of Contrast on Referential Form: Investigating the Distinction Between Strong and Weak Pronouns
To further our understanding of the nature of the form–function mapping in anaphoric paradigms, this study investigated the referential properties of strong pronouns (long pronouns) in Estonian. Cross-linguistically, 2 main accounts of the long–short distinction have been proposed: the salience account (long pronouns refer to less salient antecedents) and the contrast account (long pronouns ref...
متن کاملOn the Dimensions of Discourse Salience
This paper describes results of two corpus studies of information packaging of discourse referents in German dedicated to the following questions: • Do sentence-initial position, pronominalization and subject role assignment reflect a single underlying dimension of discourse salience or multiple dimensions ? • If there are multiple dimensions of salience, is it possible to associate them with a...
متن کامل