Different effects of focus in intra- and inter-sentential pronoun resolution in German

Abstract

It is widely assumed that focused entities are more salient than non-focused ones and consequently, that an antecedent should be particularly available for a pronoun when it is foregrounded in a cleft construction. Contrary to this assumption, however, some studies observed that an antecedent focused by a cleft was less accessible than a non-focused one. We claim that the influence of clefting depends on the position of the ambiguous pronoun: clefted antecedents are only preferred as antecedents of a pronoun when the pronoun and its antecedent are in different discourse units. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a questionnaire and a visual world experiment in German in which we manipulated inter- vs. intra-sentential pronoun resolution. Results showed that clefting had different effects depending on the position of the pronoun. We will discuss why these results are consistent with the claim that pronouns preferentially co-refer with the sentence topic.

Keywords:

• language comprehension
• information structure
• pronoun resolution
• focus
• eye-tracking
• visual world paradigm

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Friederike Voß for help in conducting the experiment and Emilia Ellsiepen and Coralie Vincent for help with some of the data analyses. Many thanks also to Israel de la Fuente and Andy Kehler for insightful discussions on various aspects of the paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In all examples translated from German and French, we choose to literally translate the time in the cleft. For this reason, the time of the cleft is present tense even when the past tense would be preferred in English.

2. The translational counterparts of English it-clefts in null subject Romance languages, such as Spanish and Italian, are characterised by the absence of a cleft pronoun.

3. We are of course aware of the fact that there are a number of studies investigating task effects in the visual world paradigm (see Salverda et al., 2011, for an overview). In our experiment, we are only interested in task effects on the automaticity of pronoun resolution in the visual world paradigm.

4. It is, however, interesting in how far small differences between the within sentence and the between sentence condition trigger differences in visual scanning behaviour: The only differences between the two conditions are (1) a continuation rise for the within sentence condition vs. a sentence final fall for the between sentence condition (see Figures 3a–d); (2) the presence of the connective “als” for the within sentence condition vs. a pause for the between sentence condition. The sentence final fall and the pause seem to be a cue to abandon the current fixation region and to reset scanning preferences for the following discourse unit.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the programme “Investissements d'Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083).