According to different approaches to pronoun processing, in pro-drop languages, null pronouns are interpreted as referring back to the grammatical subject and topical referent, while overt pronouns are usually interpreted as coreferring with a non-subject and non-topical antecedent. The present study investigates whether thematic role and grammatical function impact (overt and null) pronoun production in Romania. Results show that we do not encounter a clear division of labour between the two pronoun forms triggered by syntactic structure alone and that thematic roles matter as well. The findings support a multi-dimensional approach, suggesting that different referential forms are constrained by different factors.
Natural languages display a great variety of devices that may be used to speak of causal relations, ranging from prepositions, sentence connectives and verbs. This paper focuses on the way in which different classes of verbs affect the subsequent discourse in terms of implicit causality. We report on an offline sentence-continuation study that tested next mention preferences triggered by four Romanian classes of verbs and compare them these results with verbal biases observed in other languages.
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