Interpretation preferences in contexts with three antecedents: examining the role of prominence in German pronouns

Abstract

This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and “dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” involves computing a prominence hierarchy of the prior referents, and excluding the referent with the highest prominence rank. The demonstrative “dieser” has not been extensively tested. In the current study, personal and demonstrative pronominal forms were investigated following ditransitive contexts, where three potential antecedents are available, in two rating experiments. The personal pronoun showed flexibility in that it received equally high ratings for all three antecedents in canonical configurations. The ratings for dieser followed a graded sensitivity to thematic role prominence, with lowest scores when referring to prominent antecedents (agents) and the highest scores for the least prominent antecedents (patients), with scores for the medium prominence candidate (recipients) differing from both. Der followed a similar but not identical pattern, with a less marked difference between lower prominence candidates. Positional information also has a strong influence on demonstratives. In sum, final interpretation is sensitive to fine-grained differences in prominence hierarchies.

German demonstrative pronouns differ in their sensitivity to discourse and sentence topics

“…Dieser, Patil et al (2023) argue, is not sensitive to perspective-taking, but also avoids the most prominent discourse referent, which is then the discourse topic. Patterson and Schumacher (2021) found no significant difference between the use of der and dieser in forced-choice and acceptability judgment tasks of ambiguous contexts with three antecedents, but both showed a certain preference for the last mentioned antecedent, supporting the claim of Zifonun et al (1997) for dieser. Finally, Patil et al (2020) found register differences between der and dieser, such that dieser tends toward more formal, and der toward more informal, language.…”

“…This is actually in line with previous studies that have described a potential subject or first-position preference for personal pronouns (cf. Kaiser and Trueswell, 2008;Kaiser, 2011;Fuchs and Schumacher, 2020;Patterson and Schumacher, 2021). We reserve some doubt about these results since the same effect did not emerge in our second pair of experiments (2a and 2b; see below).…”

“…Any estimated parameter that is non-zero will thus have to overcome a slight bias encoded in the priors, with higher values going against a stronger bias, so that we err on the side of caution (i.e., of assuming a null effect even if one is actually present) with such a prior. Note that previous acceptability studies (e.g., Patterson and Schumacher, 2021;Patil et al, 2023) on German personal and demonstrative pronouns have found effects in the range of about 0-2 points on the 7-point Likert scale, so that more restrictive priors would also be a reasonable alternative. Boxplots with raw median (black lines) and mean (diamonds) per crossed condition for Experiment 1a (er/der).…”

“…The demonstrative dieser has been less intensively studied, primarily using offline studies: Abraham (2002), Ahrenholz (2007, Weinert (2007) report on corpus studies, Fuchs and Schumacher (2020) from sentence completion tasks, Patil et al (2020Patil et al ( , 2023 and Patterson and Schumacher (2021) on forced-choice and acceptability judgment tasks. Summing up their findings, dieser behaves very similarly to der: in ambiguous contexts, i.e., in contexts with two or more antecedents, both demonstratives refer to the less prominent antecedent.…”

Modeling prominence constraints for German pronouns as weighted retrieval cues

“…In (1) the factors of subjecthood and agenthood align such that the firefighter is the subject and agent of the sentence, whereas the boy is the object and patient of the sentence. However, when subjecthood and agenthood don't align, German pronouns show a mixed effect of subjecthood and agenthood (Schumacher et al, 2016;Patterson & Schumacher, 2021).…”