Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.

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In German, the subject usually precedes the object (SO order), but, under certain discourse conditions, the object is allowed to precede the subject (OS order). This paper focuses on main clauses in which either the subject or a discourse-given object occurs in clause-initial position. Two acceptability experiments show that OS sentences with a given object are generally acceptable, but the precise degree of acceptability varies both with the object‘s referential form (demonstrative objects leading to higher acceptability than other types of objects) and with formal properties of the subject (pronominal subjects leading to higher acceptability than non-pronominal subjects). For SO sentences, acceptability was reduced when the object was a d-pronoun, which contrasts with the high acceptability of OS sentences with a d-pronoun object. This finding was explored in a third acceptability experiment comparing d-pronouns in subject and object function. This experiment provides evidence that a reduction in acceptability due to a prescriptive bias against d-pronouns is suspended when the d-pronoun occurs as object in the prefield. We discuss the experimental results with respect to theories of German clause structure that claim that OS sentences with different information-structural properties are derived by different types of movement.

Anaphoric demonstrative pronouns (d-pronouns), which are found in some languages in addition to the more common personal pronouns (p-pronouns), provide an interesting test case for theories of pronoun resolution. With regard to structural factors (e.g., syntactic function, linear position, topichood), d-pronouns have been found to stand in complementary relation to p-pronouns. Whereas the latter prefer structurally prominent antecedents, the former prefer structurally non-prominent antecedents. In contrast to structural factors, semantic factors (e.g., implicit causality and consequentiality) have been intensively explored for p-pronouns but not for d-pronouns. In particular, it is an open question whether semantic biases can override structural biases in the case of d-pronouns in the same way as it has been shown for p-pronouns. We have addressed this question in three sentence completion experiments and one acceptability experiment that investigated German p- and d-pronouns. Semantic bias was manipulated by including causal and consequential discourse markers in the interpretation experiments. The production experiments used questions to elicit continuations expressing causes and consequences. The results show that the semantic factor of coherence influences p- and d-pronouns in similar ways. Based on our experimental results, we show that the Bayesian Theory of Pronoun Resolution (Kehler et al. 2008), which captures the relationship between pronoun interpretation and pronoun production in a quantitative way, provides a good fit of observed and predicted values for both p- and d-pronouns.

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