Comprehension of marked pronouns in Spanish and English: Object anaphors cross-linguistically

Abstract

Previous research on pronoun resolution has identified several individual factors that are deemed to be important for resolving reference. In this paper, we argue that of these factors, as tested here, plausibility is the most important, but interacts with form markedness and structural parallelism. We investigated how listeners resolved object pronouns that were ambiguous in the sense of having more than one possible antecedent. We manipulated the form of the anaphoric expression in terms of accentuation (English: Experiments 1a and 2a) and morphology (Spanish: Experiments 1b and 2b). We looked at sentences where both antecedents were equally plausible, or where only one of the antecedents was plausible. Listeners generally resolved toward the (parallel) grammatical object of the previous clause. When the pronouns were marked due to accentuation (English) or use of specific morphology (Spanish), preference switched to the alternative antecedent, the grammatical subject of the previous clause. In contrast, when one of the two antecedents was a much more plausible antecedent than the other, antecedent choice was almost wholly dictated by plausibility, although reference form prominence did significantly attenuate the strength of the preference.

Keywords:

• Pronouns
• Anaphora
• Accent

Notes

¹We use the following abbreviations: OBJ = object, PST = past tense, 3 = third person, sg = singular, PREP = preposition.

²The strong version of this hypothesis suggests that grammatical roles need to be completely identical, so that oblique object pronouns would not refer to direct object pronouns. This suggestion was disconfirmed by Kehler et al. (2008), and so we take the weak version, that subjects refer to subjects, and objects refer to objects.

³We examined how readers produced Chapter 1 of Pride and Prejudice (which is a text particularly rich in accented pronouns), where Mrs. Bennet exclaims: “I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving HER the preference.” (Austen, 1813/n.d.). Two analysts examined the prosody of four speakers producing the utterance. Three of the four speakers produced an L + H* contour. Accordingly, L + H* was the pitch accent used in the studies described below.

⁴The translators agreed that subject accenting sounded highly unnatural in Spanish, in contrast with English, where it was considered fairly natural. Since inclusion of an unnatural form could fundamentally change the nature of the task, making the two experiments less comparable, the accented subject condition was dropped.

⁵The word probabilidad was used instead of plausibility. Probabilidad is closer in meaning to probability, but the translators felt it was the closest translation equivalent in Spanish.