Thematic role as prominence cue during pronoun resolution in German

Schumacher, Petra B.; Dangl, Manuel; Uzun, Elyesa

doi:10.1515/9783110464108-011

Cited by 29 publications

(108 citation statements)

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“…One possible explanation for this interaction could be that diese-demonstratives behave the same way as die-demonstratives when the subject of the sentence is not in the clause initial position. The weakening of non-subject bias for die-demonstratives in non-canonical structures has been reported in a similar forced-choice antecedent selection task (Schumacher et al 2016) and also in a sentence completion study .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

“…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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Patil

Bosch

Hinterwimmer

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Demonstrative pronouns in German occur in various paradigms such as die, diese, jene, diejenige, dieselbe, etc. Among these only the most frequent paradigm, die, has received attention from psycholinguistic research. In this paper, we investigate constraints on demonstrative pronouns from the diese paradigm. Diese-demonstratives are considered to be limited to formal language by native speakers, and in contemporary grammar they are assumed to prefer the most recent or the last mentioned antecedent. If these constraints really hold, diese-demonstratives seem to behave very differently from die-demonstratives which have been shown to prefer the antecedent that is not maximally prominent. We report three forced-choice experiments that test the constraints of language formality, order of mention and prominence through subjecthood. The results demonstrate that diese-demonstratives strongly prefer the formal language register as expected by native speakers. However, instead of the last mentioned antecedent, they prefer the antecedent that is non-prominent in terms of subjecthood which is similar to the preference that has been reported in the literature for die-demonstratives. We suggest that in a restricted context diese-demonstratives are formal counterparts of die-demonstratives.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 62%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Patil

Bosch

Hinterwimmer

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…6 Kaiser [23], for instance, reports that the interpretation of German demonstratives, which tend to be strongly biased toward the preceding object, is modulated to some degree by coherence relations, but less so than are personal pronouns, which tend to be biased toward the preceding subject. (For related work on demonstratives see [24] for Finnish and [39,40] for German.) Such a finding is consistent with the Bayesian Model if in fact demonstratives have a stronger production bias toward the object than personal pronouns do toward the subject.…”

Section: Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prominence and coherence in a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation

Kehler

Rohde

2019

Journal of Pragmatics

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A standard assumption in linguistic and psycholinguistic research on pronoun use is that production and interpretation are guided by the same set of contextual factors. Kehler et al. (2008) and Kehler & Rohde (2013) have argued instead for a model based on Bayesian principles in which pronoun production is insensitive to a class of semantically-and pragmatically-driven contextual biases that have been shown to influence pronoun interpretation. Here we evaluate the model using a passage completion study that employs a subtle contextual manipulation to which traditional analyses are insensitive, specifically by varying whether or not a relative clause that modifies the direct object in the context sentence invites the inference of a cause of the event that the sentence denotes.The results support the claim that pronoun interpretation biases, but not production biases, are sensitive to this pragmatic enrichment, revealing precisely the asymmetry predicted by our Bayesian Model. A correlation analysis further establishes that the model provides better estimates of measured pronoun interpretation biases than two competing models from the literature.

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“…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). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical Role Parallelism Influences Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution in German

Sauermann

Gagarina

2017

Front. Psychol.

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Previous research on pronoun resolution in German revealed that personal pronouns in German tend to refer to the subject or topic antecedents, however, these results are based on studies involving subject personal pronouns. We report a visual world eye-tracking study that investigated the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on the online comprehension of pronouns in German-speaking adults. Word order of the antecedents and parallelism by the grammatical role of the anaphor was modified in the study. The results show that parallelism of the grammatical role had an early and strong effect on the processing of the pronoun, with subject anaphors being resolved to subject antecedents and object anaphors to object antecedents, regardless of the word order (information status) of the antecedents. Our results demonstrate that personal pronouns may not in general be associated with the subject or topic of a sentence but that their resolution is modulated by additional factors such as the grammatical role. Further studies are required to investigate whether parallelism also affects offline antecedent choices.

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Thematic role as prominence cue during pronoun resolution in German

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Prominence and coherence in a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation

Grammatical Role Parallelism Influences Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution in German

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