Backward- and Forward-Looking Potential of Anaphors

Abstract

Personal pronouns and demonstratives contribute differently to the encoding of information in the mental model and they serve distinct backward- and forward-looking functions. While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent discourse entity (backward-looking function) and typically mark the maintenance of the current topic, demonstratives are used to refer to a less prominent entity and serve the additional forward-looking function of signaling a possible topic shift. In Experiment 1, we present an ERP study that examines the time course of processing personal and d-pronouns in German (er vs. der) and assesses the impact of two prominence features of the antecedent, thematic role and sentential position, as well as neurophysiological correlates of backward- and forward-looking functions of referential expressions. We tested the comprehension of personal and d-pronouns following context sentences containing two potential antecedents. In addition to the factor pronoun type (er vs. der), we varied the verb type (active accusative verbs vs. dative experiencer verbs) and the thematic role order (canonical vs. non-canonical) in the context sentences to vary the antecedent's prominence. Time-locked to pronoun-onset, the ERPs revealed a general biphasic N400-Late Positivity for d-pronouns over personal pronouns with further subtle interactions of the prominence-lending cues in the early time window. The findings indicate that the calculation of the referential candidates' prominence (backward-looking function) is guided by thematic role and positional information. Thematic role information, in combination with initial position, thus represents a central predictor during referential processing. Coreference with a less prominent entity (assumed for d-pronouns) results in processing costs (N400). The additional topic shift signaled by d-pronouns (forward-looking function) results in attentional reorienting (Late Positivity). This is further supported by Experiment 2, a story continuation study, which showed that personal pronouns trigger topic maintenance, while d-pronouns yield topic shifts.

Constraints on German <i>diese</i> demonstratives: language formality and subject-avoidance

“…However, later , Hinterwimmer (2015) and argued that under the circumstances where subject-and topichood diverge, it is in fact (discourse or aboutness) topic that is avoided and not the subject (see also Ellert 2013 for eye-tracking studies reporting influence of information structure on personal and demonstrative pronouns). On the other hand, Schumacher et al (2015), Schumacher et al (2016) and Schumacher et al (2017) showed using various experiments that agentivity is also a crucial factor in determining the antecedent of the demonstrative pronoun, and in fact subjecthood might be an epiphenomenon because in many cases subjecthood and agenthood overlap. And finally, in a recent work, Hinterwimmer et al (2019) have provided more experimental evidence and suggested a modified version of Hinterwimmer & Bosch (2018) that encompasses the existing results.…”

Grammatical Role Parallelism Influences Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution in German

“…In addition, thematic status, subject status and information status have separate effects on pronoun resolution, which can be revealed when different constructions are investigated (e.g., Ellert, 2013; Schumacher et al, 2015, 2016). …”

An experimental investigation of the binding options of demonstrative pronouns in German

“…Kleinman 1994;Arnold 1999;Arnold & Wasow 2000). In fact, Schumacher et al (2015) have recently shown that personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns behave differently depending on the syntactic position that they appear in. Clearly, more research is needed to disentangle type of pronoun and syntactic position.…”

“…For non-canonical word order, no interpretation bias was found for PPros or DPros. The authors concluded that multiple prominence cues negotiate during pronoun interpretation, with thematic role presumably being a stronger predictor than grammatical role (see also Schumacher et al 2015 for evidence from event-related potentials).…”

“…The co-referential behavior of German demonstrative pronouns (DPros) of the der/die/das paradigm has received considerable attention in the literature, including empirical and corpus investigations (Bosch, Rozario & Zhao 2003;Bosch & Umbach 2006;Bosch, Katz & Umbach 2007;Kaiser & Trueswell 2008;Schumacher, Backhaus & Dangl 2015;Järvikivi, Van Gompel & Hyönä 2016;Schumacher, Dangl & Uzun 2016;Schumacher, Roberts & Järvikivi 2017). Much less is known about the interpretation of DPros in binding configurations, i.e.…”