Accented Pronouns and Unusual Antecedents : A Corpus Study

In particular, [2, 3, 4, 5] have argued that the referent of an accented pronoun is not in the immediate focus of attention, so the accent serves as a cue to its cognitive status. Empirical evaluations [6, 7] have found little support for these claims, although these studies could not investigate the potentially confounding influence of contrast, and suffered from insufficient or inadequate data and statistical analysis. Thus, the question of what pronominal accent is signaling (if anything) and the factors that determine its distribution, remain highly in need of study.