Shifting from animacy to agentivity

Garcia, Marco Garcia; Primus, Beatrice; Himmelmann, Nikolaus P.

doi:10.1515/tl-2018-0002

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Following Primus (1999), we assume that the linearization of thematic roles in canonical order gives rise to a clear prominence ranking among the three potential antecedents in ditransitive contexts (with an inanimate patient): Agent > Recipient > Patient. Note that, while animacy has been viewed as a prominence-lending feature in previous research (e.g., Aissen, 1999Aissen, , 2003, we assume that animacy is an epiphenomenon of agentivity and its feature specification (García García et al, 2018;. If it were to exert an independent influence on prominence, animacy would, in any case, align with the ranking shown above.…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 81%

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

Patterson

Schumacher

2021

Applied Psycholinguistics

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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.

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Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 81%

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

Patterson

Schumacher

2021

Applied Psycholinguistics

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“…Put differently, the impact of telicity depends on affectedness. Note that there is a further verbal category that has been identified as favouring DOM in Spanish and other (Romance) languages independently of affectedness, namely agentivity (seeGarcía García, Primus &Himmelmann 2018 andMürmann 2023 for extensive discussions). 5…”

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confidence: 99%

Differential Object Marking and discourse prominence in Spanish

Von Heusinger,

Duarte,

García

2024

isogloss

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Spanish, like many other Romance and non-Romance languages, shows Differential Object Marking (DOM), i.e., some direct objects are morphologically marked by the prepositional marker a ‘to’, while others remain unmarked. The literature has proposed different sentential parameters in order to capture this variation (Fábregas 2013, among others), including topicality (see Leonetti 2004, Iemmolo 2010, among others). In addition, Laca (1995: 82f.) has argued that DOM also depends on discourse properties. She assumes that in Spanish the use of DOM with an indefinite direct object signals that more information about this object referent is to be expected in the upcoming discourse (see also Comrie 1981/1989). First empirical evidence for this hypothesis comes from DOM in Romanian (Chiriacescu & von Heusinger 2010). In this paper we explore the hypothesis that, in Spanish, human indefinite direct objects with DOM show more forward-looking potential than those without DOM. We present original results from two corpus studies and two paragraph continuation tasks. The corpus studies provide support for the discourse effect of DOM, while the paragraph continuation tasks do not, which might be due to the particular design of our experimental items. We evaluate the different parameters that contribute to the discourse prominence of a direct object with DOM and those that might mask such effects. We conclude that there is evidence that DOM contributes to discourse prominence, but that further studies are necessary.

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Studies in Corpus Linguistics

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Shifting from animacy to agentivity

Cited by 6 publications

References 24 publications

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

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

Differential Object Marking and discourse prominence in Spanish

Studies in Corpus Linguistics

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