Pronouns, reflexives and something in-between: A cross-linguistic investigation of reference resolution in Finnish, German and Dutch

In English and in many languages, it has been observed that pronouns and reflexives are in (nearly) complementary distribution. However, the complementarity breaks down in representational NPs (RNPs, e.g. picture of her/herself). In English RNPs, (i) interpretation of reflexives is guided by a strong structural subject preference and a weaker semantic source-of-information preference (Kuno 1987), and (ii) interpretation of pronouns is guided by a non-subject preference and a perceiver-of-information preference (Tenny 2003). These patterns are robust in off-line data and on-line processing (Kaiser et al. 2008), but the nature of the semantic preferences is not wellunderstood. To further our understanding of the source/perceiver effects, we conducted three experiments investigating the interpretation of pronouns, reflexives and emphatics in RNPs in German, Dutch and Finnish. The experiments aim to shed light on three aspects of the source/perceiver preference: (1) Can the source preference be attributed to intensifiers? (2) Can the source preference be derived from a general prominence bias? (3) How typologically and syntactically robust are the source/perceiver effects? Are they restricted only to certain syntactic constructions or to certain language families?