The role of prosody in overt pronoun resolution in a null subject language and in a non-null subject language: A production study

Abstract

In this study, we investigate how prosodic cues are used when an overt pronoun is associated with either a subject or an object antecedent in Italian and in Swedish. To address this question, 28 Italian speakers and 28 Swedish speakers completed a production task, by reading out loud globally-ambiguous sentences containing overt pronouns and a control interpretation task, where they selected either a subject or an object antecedent for each pronoun, contained in a globally-ambiguous sentence. We expected that the different preference patterns in antecedent assignment in the two languages would affect the speakers’ use of prosody. In Italian, overt pronouns are usually associated with object antecedents, whereas null pronouns are usually associated with subject antecedents (Position of Antecedent Strategy – “PAS” – Carminati 2002). On the other hand, Swedish overt pronouns leave a measure of ambiguity with respect to antecedent assignment. The results of the control interpretation task confirmed that the Italian speakers conformed to the PAS, but the results for the Swedish speakers unexpectedly indicated a preference for subject antecedents. For the production task, the Italian speakers produced longer inter-clausal pauses and pronouns with a higher degree of prominence with subject rather than object antecedents. In contrast, the Swedish speakers produced longer pauses and pronouns with a higher degree of prominence with object rather than subject antecedents. These results suggest that inter-clausal pause and prosodic prominence favoured the most unpredictable antecedent of overt pronouns (see Goad et al. 2018): the subject in Italian and the object in Swedish.

Speech Pauses and Pronominal Anaphors

“…This can be interpreted as a signal that pauses which precede a personal abstract pronoun in some cases signal that the referent of the anaphor is of a less expected type given its referent. This could be a similar function to that identified for other referential phenomena by (Gargiulo et al, 2019). However, the frequency of unmarked pronouns as referent of entities of higher abstractness degree also confirms the observation that there are language specific differences with respect to individual and abstract reference between Danish and English as discussed in Navarretta (2002), Navarretta (2004).…”

“…We propose that the presence of a pause, in these cases, might mark that the referent of the pronoun is not the most expected one. In this cases, pauses have a similar function as that observed by Gargiulo et al (2019) on Italian and Swedish overt individual pronouns with subject or object antecedents. However, since the data are of limited size and we do not have other corpora to compare our data with, this supposition should be tested in more dialogues.…”

“…Moreover, Roesiger et al (2017) test these findings on German data and conclude that pitch accents and phrasing improve coreference resolution. Gargiulo et al (2019) study prosodic features and overt pronouns with individual antecedents in subject or object position in a production study involving Italian and Swedish speakers. They conclude that in both languages longer pauses precede inter-clausal pronouns when the antecedent is the less expected one.…”

“…Since salience is one of the main factors influencing the interpretation of pronominal anaphors, stress information is relevant in our context. Moreover, speech pauses have been interpreted as cognitive signals showing that the speaker is going to produce an abstract or complex concept Rochester (1973), Reynolds and Paivio (1968) or is going to refer to an object who has not the highest salience level e.g., (Gargiulo et al, 2019). More precisely, we analyze the relation between stress, speech pauses and tpngs pronouns in Danish annotated dialogues and then use this relation in language models on which we train classifiers to discriminate individual and abstract anaphors from other uses of these pronouns, and to predict the referent type of abstract anaphors.…”

Pronoun interpretation in Italian

“…Evidence from production is consistent with stress as overturning. Gargiulo and colleagues examined effects of stress and pause on the production of overt pronouns in Italian (Gargiulo, 2020) and Swedish (Gargiulo et al, 2019). Participants first read a context, establishing the likely referent for a pronoun.…”