Empirical Perspectives on Anaphora Resolution 9783110464108, 9783110459685

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution: A cross-linguistic overview
Effects of coherence on anaphor resolution, and vice versa: Evidence from French personal pronouns and anaphoric demonstratives
How clausal linking affects noun phrase salience in pronoun resolution
Information structure eects on null and overt subject comprehension in Spanish
Factors determining the choice of anaphora in Old High German – A survey of zero and personal pronoun usage in Otfrid
Constraints on choice of referring expression in Yurakaré
Strong indenites in Turkish, referential persistence, and salience structure
Anaphoric reference by demonstrative pronouns in German. In search of the relevant parameters
Thematic role as prominence cue during pronoun resolution in German
Binding and coreference in non-native language processing
Children’s eye gaze reveals their use of discourse context in object pronoun resolution
Index

Citation preview

Empirical Perspectives on Anaphora Resolution

Linguistische Arbeiten

Edited by Klaus von Heusinger, Gereon Müller, Ingo Plag, Beatrice Primus, Elisabeth Stark and Richard Wiese

Volume 563

Empirical Perspectives on Anaphora Resolution

Edited by Anke Holler and Katja Suckow

ISBN 978-3-11-045968-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-046410-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-046232-6 ISSN 0344-6727 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface This volume is a collection of original papers presented at the workshop “Information structural evidence in the race for salience” held in 2013 at the annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) in Potsdam and the 2012 workshop on “Cognitive and linguistic mechanisms of anaphoric reference in literary and non-literary texts” of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen. We want to especially thank Miriam Ellert for the co-organisation of both workshops, which brought the authors of this collection together and initiated a productive discussion. We are also very grateful to Susanne Trissler; her attention to detail helped to set this book apart and made a huge difference. Special thanks go to Heinke Jank, Markus Paluch, Susanna Salem and Luzie Schmidt for their technical and organisational assistance and Anna Fenner and Christine Göb for their editorial feedback. We thank the series editors for their helpful support during the course of editing this book. The collection reviews recent theoretically well-informed experimental and corpus-based results of several teams in Europe and the US working on anaphora resolution. All the articles have undergone a double-blind peer-review process with at least two reviews for each paper. We want to thank Maria Nella Carminati, Marco Coniglio, Chris Cummins, Monique Flecken, Juhani Järvikivi, Katerina Kandylaki, Clare Patterson, Svetlana Petrova, Ludovica Serratrice, Carla Umbach, Roger P. G. van Gompel, Jacolien van Rij, Jorrig Vogels and Thomas Weskott for their review work, and the members of the Courant Research Centre Text Structures for constructive discussions. Göttingen, March 2016 Anke Holler and Katja Suckow

Contents Preface | V Anke Holler and Katja Suckow Introduction | 1 Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth, Saveria Colonna, and Sarah Schimke The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution: A cross-linguistic overview | 11 Elsi Kaiser and Boutaina Cherqaoui Effects of coherence on anaphor resolution, and vice versa: Evidence from French personal pronouns and anaphoric demonstratives | 33 Anke Holler and Katja Suckow How clausal linking affects noun phrase salience in pronoun resolution | 61 Jeffrey T. Runner and Alyssa Ibarra Information structure effects on null and overt subject comprehension in Spanish | 87 Augustin Speyer Factors determining the choice of anaphora in Old High German – A survey of zero and personal pronoun usage in Otfrid | 113 Sonja Gipper Constraints on choice of referring expression in Yurakaré | 143 Umut Özge, Duygu Özge, and Klaus von Heusinger Strong indefinites in Turkish, referential persistence, and salience structure | 169 Peter Bosch and Stefan Hinterwimmer Anaphoric reference by demonstrative pronouns in German. In search of the relevant parameters | 193 Petra B. Schumacher, Manuel Dangl, and Elyesa Uzun Thematic role as prominence cue during pronoun resolution in German | 213

VIII | Contents

Claudia Felser Binding and coreference in non-native language processing | 241 Jacolien van Rij, Bart Hollebrandse, and Petra Hendriks Children’s eye gaze reveals their use of discourse context in object pronoun resolution | 267 Index | 295

Anke Holler and Katja Suckow

Introduction Reference resolution and the interpretation of anaphoric expressions in sentences and texts are classic topics of theoretical linguistics and cognitive psychology. Thus, there is tremendous work done in both fields seeking to describe the relations between anaphors and their antecedents. Accordingly, relevant disciplinary handbooks mostly include a survey of pronoun interpretation or reference resolution (e.g. Rickheit, Herrmann, and Deutsch 2003; Maienborn, von Heusinger, and Portner 2012; Kiss and Alexiadou 2015 among others). However, both fields differ in their focal research interests: theoretical linguistics primarily aims at modeling anaphoric proforms and coreferential relations with the means of formal grammar whereas cognitive psychology puts the emphasis on computational aspects as well as memory constraints which affect reference resolution. Psycholinguistics then combines both, the formal component with the cognitive perspective, and explores the processing consequences of linguistically marked anaphoric dependencies during language comprehension. Based on insights of theoretical linguistics, which analyses antecedent-anaphor relations as they occur in complete (sequences of) sentences, and develops models that capture the form and meaning of these relations, psycholinguistics studies the psychological manifestation of coreference and the temporal course of anaphora interpretation. Hence psycholinguistics understands reference resolution as a combination of mental processes that incrementally operate at different linguistic and nonlinguistic levels. Pronoun interpretation and anaphora resolution have been an object of research in linguistics and psycholinguistics for several decades. In this course, a variety of theoretical and processing aspects were addressed. Theoretical syntax has concentrated on intra-sentential pronoun interpretation, and has mainly searched for the general patterns of pronominal distribution and the pertinent constraints on coindexation and coreference within a syntactic domain. The discovery of underlying universal tendencies in anaphoric binding and the formal definition of relevant syntactic binding principles are the most significant results of this strand of theoretical research. (For a recent overview of pronominal and anaphoric binding including cross-linguistic variation see Fischer 2015.) Formal semantics on the other hand has developed dynamic theories of interpretation taking up ideas on discourse referents by Karttunen (1971), and Anke Holler, Katja Suckow: University of Göttingen, Germany

2 | Anke Holler and Katja Suckow

hence allowing to account for aspects of linguistic meaning that are related to the connections between sentences in a discourse. In particular, Kamp’s (1981) Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) directed the research focus in the field of pronoun interpretation and reference resolution to inter-sentential anaphora and the conditions under which they are licensed. In the course of this research process, the effects of information structure during discourse interpretation attracted more attention. That is why almost all current theoretical models that capture discourse anaphora also incorporate information structural facts. Additionally, the work by Asher and Lascarides (2003) and their extension of DRT to Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) renewed interest in rhetorical structure and discourse segmentation. Hence, most recent formal treatments of anaphoric dependencies emphasise the relevance of discourse-relational structure and coherence for inter-sentential anaphora resolution. A further issue in explaining anaphoric relations concerns the accessibility of antecedent candidates of an anaphor. There are two ways to tackle this issue. Firstly, in a formal semantics framework of discourse interpretation, accessibility is taken as a binary notion, which means that an antecedent candidate is either accessible and thus resolves a certain proform or it cannot be accessed for linguistic reasons. According to this view, the retrieval of a referent is only restricted by structural or semantic constraints being part of the grammatical system of a language. The complexity of the anaphoric proform or the salience of a potential antecedent does not influence accessibility. This contrasts with a second view on accessibility, which is inspired by cognitive psychology and understands accessibility as a graded notion that reflects cognitive activation. On the basis of stipulated salience or accessibility scales that designate different statuses to the potential referents which may be accessed by different types of referential expressions, it is argued that the retrieval of an antecedent referent is dependent on a matching between the amount of information encoded in the referring expression and the salience of the potential referent. Furthermore, it is assumed that referents with a relatively low salience can be accessed by full noun phrases only, whereas unstressed or zero pronouns may access highly activated and salient referents. Several prominent proposals for salience scales that map different degrees of accessibility have been made, cf. Prince (1981); Grosz and Sidner (1986); Ariel (1988, 1990); Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993) and Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein (1995). While the Accessibility Theory by Ariel (1988, 1990) stresses the degree of complexity of an anaphoric linguistic form, the Givenness Hierarchy proposed by Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993) comprises six cognitive statuses ranging from “in focus” to “type identifiable” that are claimed to be relevant to the form of a referential expression in discourse.

Introduction

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Besides the mentioned theories of accessibility modeling, Centering Theory (cf. e.g. Brennan, Friedman, and Pollard 1987; Walker, Joshi, and Prince 1998) is another influential framework that models discourse processing factors and makes predictions for the choice of referring expressions in discourse by comprising thematic text structure. Its fundamental concepts are so-called centers that are defined as semantic entities being part of the discourse model for each utterance in a discourse segment. The proposed set of centers together with the constraints and rules on transitions between discourse segments form the basis of Centering Theory. It thus provides a formal model of discourse interpretation that captures the relationships between attentional state, the form of referring expressions and the control of inferential processes. Roughly speaking, Centering Theory expresses discourse salience by center ranking. If the accessibility of a noun phrase is a measure for the current salience or activity of the mental entity to which the noun phrase refers, the multiple factors that may affect the salience of an entity come into focus. Substantial empirical research has shown that phonologic and morpho-syntactic as well as semantic and pragmatic information guides the way an anaphor may find a salient antecedent. There is wide agreement that apart from gender and number congruency, grammatical function (or obliqueness) and thematic role assignment may affect salience and hence anaphor resolution. Furthermore, ample empirical evidence has been provided that order of mention, animateness and topichood have an impact on noun phrase salience, and that the syntagmatic distance between an anaphor and its antecedent, which is also known as recency effect, seems to be a relevant factor for the activation of an antecedent candidate. Last but not least, the information-structural status of a potential antecedent in terms of providing new or familiar information as well as the way of embedding into discourse structure are known factors influencing salience. Against the background of the outlined findings, the present volume gives a comprehensive overview of the state of discussion regarding the interpretation and the processing of anaphoric expressions in sentences and texts, and delivers insights into the empirical and experimental methods and techniques currently used in investigating the resolution of anaphora. While research on anaphor resolution traditionally focused on structural cues of the antecedent, the interaction between discourse factors and information structure affecting antecedent salience has been more thoroughly explored in recent years. This volume depicts eleven selected peer-reviewed research papers that tackle issues in anaphor resolution from theoretical, empirical and experimental perspectives. These collected articles present a wide spectrum of cross-linguistic data, including e.g. Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Yurakaré, and also offer new results from L1 and L2 acquisition

4 | Anke Holler and Katja Suckow

studies. Data interpretations span from typological to psycholinguistic viewpoints and are related to recent developments in linguistic theory. One data analysis puts the issue of anaphor resolution in a historical context. The following key questions are addressed in this volume: – How do resolution cues that are usually taken as markers of salience interact with linguistic devices encoding information structure during language comprehension? – Which kind of information can shift the attentional focus, making an antecedent more salient? A related questions is: What are the restrictions for the interplay of these different factors? – Which role plays topicality for both, the identification of an antecedent and the choice of anaphoric proforms? Which constraints guide the choice of referring expressions? – How does saliency restrict different anaphoric proforms? How can findings of corpus techniques and linguistic field investigations further contribute to this resolution problem? – In which way does intra-sentential pronoun interpretation differ from intersentential resolution of discourse anaphora, and how does discourse segmentation affect these processes? – How do theoretically defined syntactic binding principles relate to anaphoric binding processes of language comprehension and production? – How do language learners differ in anaphoric resolution from adult native speakers? What kind of information do non-native learners or children use for anaphora resolution? These key questions are taken up by the contributions of this collection in different ways. The book starts with a group of articles focusing on the interplay of information status and discourse coherence during the computation of anaphoric dependencies, and approach this by using experimental methods such as eye-tracking and completion tasks. In the first contribution The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution: A cross-linguistic overview, Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth, Saveria Colonna, and Sarah Schimke present results from a series of offline and online studies that investigated pronoun antecedent preferences from a cross-linguistic perspective. Taking English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish into account they claim that the observed differences in baseline preferences of antecedent candidates are caused by availability and frequency of alternative unambiguous constructions. Based on the presented experimental results, the authors argue for a dynamic conception of discourse units because

Introduction

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the impact of coherence relations and information status on the salience of a potential antecedent differs within and across sentence boundaries. The paper Effects of coherence on anaphor resolution, and vice versa: Evidence from French personal pronouns and anaphoric demonstratives by Elsi Kaiser and Boutaina Cherqaoui presents a sentence completion study that investigated coherence relations for reference resolution in French. The authors tested whether the form of referring expression might lead people to interpret coherence relations as causal or temporal. The authors designed a sentence completion study that manipulated the anaphoric expression (personal pronoun vs. proximal demonstrative expression) and the type of connective (indicating causal vs. temporal relation) in a sentence. The results show that personal pronouns prefer subject and demonstratives prefer object antecedents irrespective of the type of connective. There were no clear effects of connector type; a trend suggested that with an object preference there was a tendency to interpret the ambiguous connective et après ‘and then’ causally, whereas with a subject preference the temporal reading of et après ‘and then’ was preferred. The authors argue that the link between causal relations and object reference furthers the discussion on coherence relations in pronoun resolution. In a contribution presenting experimental data, How clausal linking affects noun phrase salience in pronoun resolution, Anke Holler and Katja Suckow argue that the semantic and structural properties of clausal linking operators play a central role in antecedent selection, but also in discourse segmentation. They present two sentence continuation experiments in German, which manipulated semantic and structural properties of the connector linking two clauses; the first clause contained two noun phrases as potential antecedents of the ambiguous anaphor which was in the second clause. Previous findings on anaphora resolution has shown that IC verbs can set the preference for one of the antecedent nouns. The sentence continuations presented in the two experiments here showed that a strong connector in a coordinated clause can reverse these preferences set by the verb. The authors argue that such a change of initially set antecedent preferences might be an indicator for the start of a different discourse unit and should be considered in the current discussion about discourse segmentation. In Information structure effects on null and overt subject comprehension in Spanish by Jeffrey T. Runner and Alyssa Ibarra, the authors experimentally investigated how new information can put the focus on a specific item. The form of a pronoun can signal antecedent prominence in discourse: null pronouns prefer the more salient antecedent in Spanish. The authors designed a sentence continuation judgement test investigating how new subjects and objects affect the choice of a referring expression (null or overt pronoun). The findings confirm that null pronouns prefer antecedents in subject position. However, when an anteced-

6 | Anke Holler and Katja Suckow

ent is new in discourse this item becomes the preferred referent for both kinds of proforms. Thus, new information is an indicator for the salience of an antecedent. The following two articles of this collection do not apply experimental methods but use corpus techniques and linguistic field methods in order to approach their respective research questions, which belong to two empirical domains that are notoriously difficult to access and comprise only scarce data. For different reasons this is the case in historical linguistics as well as in the area of typology if isolated spoken or endangered languages are concerned. In his article Factors determining the choice of anaphora in Old High German – A survey of zero and personal pronoun usage in Otfrid Augustin Speyer investigates pronominal usage in the Evangelienbuch by Otfried von Weißenburg, which is a poetic Old High German text. Adopting Ariel’s (1990) hypothesis that the choice between proforms of different complexity directly depends on the salience of the respective antecedent, he reviews numerous factors known as constituting salience and explores their influence on the choice of personal and zero pronouns in Old High German. He provides corpus-based evidence that relevant factors for the variation of anaphoric expressions in Modern German such as grammatical role, first mention, and sentence type also show a significant effect in Old High German. He concludes that zero pronouns were used not in dependence of coherence relations but of salience. Moreover, he develops a scenario for a historic change in the anaphoric system which makes use of the assumption that there is a tendency in the languages of the world to have a two degree system of salience. He claims that an effect of the loss of the zero pronoun option in the course of Old High German is that the opposition between personal and demonstrative pronouns in Modern German mirrors the usage conditions of the opposition of zero and personal pronouns in Old High German. As the previous contribution the article Constraints on choice of referring expression in Yurakaré by Sonja Gipper also deals with the factors that determine the choice of zero and overt referential forms. It presents a typological study of the underdescribed language Yurakaré spoken in Bolivia. Yurakaré is peculiar as arguments in different syntactic functions like subjects or objects are not distinguished by morphological case-marking. Thus contextual information is always needed for a disambiguation of argument status. Moreover, Yurakaré realises a relatively high proportion of zero pronouns. By analysing referential relations in three narratives, Gipper explores the factors that constrain the choice of referential expressions which target arguments in Yurakaré, and demonstrates that syntagmatic distance, grammatical function and discourse topicality have a relevant impact on the realisation of zero anaphora in Yurakaré. She concludes that processing parameters interact with grammatical and information structural parameters, and points out that the results are perfectly compatible with Ariel’s (1990)

Introduction

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Accessibility Theory as well as with du Bois’ (1987) theory of Preferred Argument Structure. Afterwards follow three papers that broach the issue of grammatical salience marking by experimentally investigating certain forms of anaphoric expressions and their referential preferences. In Strong indefinites in Turkish, referential persistence, and salience structure Umut Özge, Duygu Özge, and Klaus von Heusinger investigate Turkish strong indefinites with respect to their forward-looking discourse properties. They report a web-based discourse continuation study which explored the effects of differential object-marking of Turkish indefinite direct objects on the referential persistence of the object referent and the salience structure of the discourse. Referential persistence is measured by the frequency of anaphoric references back to a strong indefinite whereas the form of an anaphoric expression (ranging from null to full forms) is taken as indication for the salience of the introduced referent. In line with previous studies they found a subject preference for zero pronouns; for referring to the object more overt forms of referential expressions were used, which confirms that subjecthood is a strong determinant of salience in Turkish. On the other hand, the object seems to be referentially more persistent. However, casemarking has no impact on referential persistence and salience structure in Turkish. The empirical domain that is employed in the contribution Anaphoric reference by demonstrative pronouns in German. In search of the relevant parameters by Peter Bosch and Stefan Hinterwimmer comprises personal and demonstrative pronouns in German. It is a well-known fact that both pronominal forms differ in their referential options. For instance, demonstrative pronouns avoid topical antecedents whereas personal pronouns preferentially target topical referents. Based on a comprehensive review of recent results of corpus analysis and experimental work approaching different parameters of attentional prominence during pronoun processing, they argue for a separation of linguistic knowledge affecting pronoun interpretation and general cognitive modules influencing prominence. Presupposing this modularity, they tested the hypothesis that demonstrative pronouns cannot refer to current topics whereas personal pronouns must not obey such a restriction. They end up by arguing that demonstratives bring about a reorientation of attention, i.e. a form of re-emphasis or contrast, speaking in general cognitive terms. In terms of linguistic knowledge, however, demonstratives avoid topics. The contribution Thematic role as prominence cue during pronoun resolution in German from Petra B. Schumacher presents experimental findings that investigate prominence factors of anaphora resolution. For anaphora resolution, the form of the pronoun can indicate a change in topic. The use of an unstressed per-

8 | Anke Holler and Katja Suckow

sonal pronoun indicates topic maintenance: it selects the prominent entity in discourse. In comparison, the use of a demonstrative pronoun signals a topic shift: the most prominent discourse entity will be excluded as the antecedent. Using personal and demonstrative pronouns, the author aims to make a clearer distinction between prominence factors such as order of mention, grammatical function and thematic role. She presents the results of a forced choice antecedent selection task and two sentence completion tasks, which shows that none of the aforementioned factors (order of mention, grammatical function and thematic role) are singular indicators for a specific antecedent in anaphora resolution. More specifically, these factors interact and thus contribute to pronoun resolution. Interestingly, investigating these interactions, the author finds that thematic role appears to be a bigger indicator for an antecedent than the grammatical role. Anaphor resolution processes can be further informed by strategies of resolution from non-native (L2) processing or from a language acquisition viewpoint. In the article Binding and coreference in non-native language processing Claudia Felser presents an overview of experimental literature on anaphora resolution in native (L1) and non-native (L2) processing. In L1 processing syntactic binding principles are believed to be automatic and fast in comparison with discourse based coreference assignment processes. However, non-native speakers usually do not build a syntactic structure as automatically as native speakers. A review of the recent literature showed that this also affects the online application of binding principles when compared to discourse assignment principles. Felser reports findings from the literature that show a delay of binding principle A; thus, in L2 processing, unlike in L1 processing, binding principles were not faster than coreference. Furthermore, the literature review showed that the binding as initial filter hypothesis, while applicable to L1, does not apply to L2 processing. Non-native speakers consider an ungrammatical antecedent during pronoun resolution. Thus, L2 learners differ from L1 language speakers. Since the former are less sensitive to structural information, the application of syntactic binding principles is not only delayed but less preferred in comparison with the application of coreference relationships. In the contribution on language acquisition, Children’s eye gaze reveals their use of discourse context in object pronoun resolution, Jacolien van Rij, Bart Hollebrandse, and Petra Hendriks describe findings from a visual world experiment showing that children use information from a visual scene to resolve an object pronoun with a subject antecedent. Adult resolution processes do not allow pronouns in object position (him or her) to refer to a subject antecedent. However, van Rij et al. discuss results that show that children up to the age of six resolve object pronouns differently than adults: they allow object pronouns to corefer to the subject noun of the sentence. Van Rij et al. describe a visual

Introduction

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world eye-tracking experiment where they investigated how children integrate contextual information (visually presented context had either a single referent or two referents) in pronoun resolution. An adult and a child group had to judge whether a given sentence matched a visual scene. Van Rij et al. found that children used the context information of a visual scene to arrive at a coreferential interpretation of an object pronoun. Children’s behaviour showed a similarity to the adults’ behaviour when there was only one referent in context. However, the behaviour between the two groups differed when there were two referents in the context. While adults quickly looked at and chose the antecedent among the two candidates, children chose and looked at the antecedent less often in a context where the correct antecedent had been named first. These findings suggest that children can resolve object pronouns like adults given a certain context. However, their interpretation of pronouns is not constrained by grammar, but by other information such as discourse and visual context. The collection of articles in this volume shows that there is an emerging multifaceted picture of theoretical, historical, empirical and experimental perspectives that sometimes complement and at other times contrast their respective ideas. This will hopefully invigorate a reader who is curious about the versatile field of anaphora resolution.

References Ariel, Mira. 1988. Referring and accessibility. Journal of Linguistics 24(1). 65–87. Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing noun phrase antecedents. London: Routledge. Asher, Nicholas & Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brennan, Susan E., Marilyn W. Friedman & Carl J. Pollard. 1987. A centering approach to pronouns. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 155–162. Stanford, CA: Association for Computational Linguistics. Fischer, Silke. 2015. Theories of binding. In Tibor Kiss & Artemis Alexiadou (eds.), Syntax – Theory and analysis. An international handbook. Vol. 2 (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 42), 1357–1399. Berlin: de Gruyter. Grosz, Barbara J., Aravind K. Joshi & Scott Weinstein. 1995. Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics 21(2). 203–226. Grosz, Barbara J. & Candace L. Sidner. 1986. Attention, intention, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12(3). 175–204. Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg & Ron Zacharski. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69(2). 274–307. Kamp, Hans. 1981. A theory of truth and semantic representation. In Jeroen Groenendijk, Theo M. V. Janssen & Martin Stokhof (eds.), Formal methods in the study of language, 277–322. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum.

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Karttunen, Lauri. 1969/1976. Discourse referents. In Proceedings of the 1969 International Conference on Computational Linguistics COLING (Preprint No. 70), 1–38. Stockholm: ACL. Reprinted in: James D. McCrawley (ed.), Syntax and Semantics 7: Notes from the linguistic underground, 363–385. New York: Academic Press, 1976. Kiss, Tibor & Artemis Alexiadou (eds.). 2015. Syntax – Theory and analysis. An international handbook. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 42). Berlin: de Gruyter. Maienborn, Claudia, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.). 2012. Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 33). Berlin: de Gruyter. Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical pragmatics, 223–255. New York: Academic Press. Rickheit, Gert, Theo Herrmann & Werner Deutsch (eds.). 2003. Psycholinguistics. An international handbook. (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 24). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth, Saveria Colonna, and Sarah Schimke

The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution: A cross-linguistic overview 1 Introduction Most psycholinguistic and computational linguistic work done in the field of reference interpretation agrees today that the process of resolving a referring expression consists of several different stages (Kehler 2008 summarizes them with the SMASH algorithm: Search, Match, And Select using Heuristics). Different resolution strategies are assumed to hold for each of the stages. First, comprehenders collect all possible referents available within a given contextual frame. No selection or ranking of referents happens at this stage. Second, these candidates are filtered out through a series of “hard” morphosyntactic constraints, such as number, gender, person, binding, etc. Finally, if more than one candidate remains possible as the antecedent of the referential expression after applying these hard constraints, the appropriate referent is selected based on some combination of “soft” constraints or heuristics (e.g. syntactic function, parallelism, thematic role, etc.). It is important to note, however, that while most psycholinguistic approaches to pronoun resolution have been primarily concerned with identifying these hard and soft constraints, little attention has been paid to providing a detailed and integrated explanation for the observed patterns, and for why different preferences seem to weigh differently in different contexts. Kehler (2008) is an exception to this rule. He explains the different weights of constraints by a combination of strategies based on preferences regarding the production of referential expressions and strategies based on discourse expectations. The goals of this article are twofold: we will give an overview of some crosslinguistic work on pronoun resolution, summarizing results from a variety of offNote: We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who surely helped making this article clearer in its argumentation and more understandable. This work has been financially supported by the Laboratoire d’Excellence “Empirical Foundations of Linguistics” (ANR-10-LABX-0083). Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth: Paris Diderot University, France Saveria Colonna: The University of Paris VIII, France Sarah Schimke: University of Münster, Germany

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line and on-line studies. Moreover, based on the observed results, we will suggest that pronoun resolution preferences in a particular language need to be explained by a combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors which, crucially, do not play out in the same manner within and across sentences (or better Discourse Units [DU], as we will argue). We will focus on two factors: the effect of the availability of alternative constructions for a particular interpretation in a language and the question of whether the pronoun and its antecedent are in the same or in a separate DU. We will relate our results to a definition of DU by Miltsakaki (2002) and show where this definition falls short of explaining the empirical results. Against previous definitions of DU that equate this notion to either the sentence or the clause, in the last section of this article, we will provide evidence in favor of a definition of DU that systematizes and accounts for the preference patterns. We will argue that all the factors to be considered are valid across languages. However, their manifestation depends on the grammar of any particular language.

2 Availability of alternative constructions Among the most interesting puzzles in psycholinguistic studies on language comprehension are those where seemingly highly parallel constructions in different languages lead to different interpretations. While English speakers accept linear (i) as well as inverse scope interpretations (ii) equally in sentences like (1a), French speakers show a strong preference for inverse scope readings (ii) in the example in (1b).¹ In relative clause attachment ambiguities such as in the examples in (2), French speakers show a strong preference for high attachment (the brother imitated the magician), which has not been found with English speakers (Cuetos and Mitchell 1988; Zagar, Pynte, and Rativeau 1997). Similarly, while English speakers prefer the subject of the main clause in (3) as antecedent of the pronoun he, French speakers strongly prefer the object antecedent for il (Hemforth et al. 2010; Colonna, Schimke, and Hemforth 2012).

1 This was recently tested by one of the authors and a group of master’s students in an unpublished acceptability judgement experiment at Paris Diderot with parallel English and French materials similar to (1a) and (1b) (20 items, 88 French speakers, 94 English speakers). While French speakers showed a strong bias for inverse scope in their acceptability judgements (scale from 1 = very bad, to 10 = very good; inverse scope: 8.3, linear scope: 6.2; t=6.63), no bias was found for English speakers (6.4 for both interpretations; t=.642).

The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution | 13

(1)

a. b.

All the children did not come to school today. i. They / ii. Some rather stayed at home. Tous les enfants ne sont pas venus à l’école aujourd’hui. i. Ils / ii. Il y en a qui ont préféré rester à la maison.

(2)

a. b.

Leah heard the brother of the clown that imitated the magician. Léa a entendu le frère du clown qui imitait le magicien.

(3)

a. b.

Peter called John before he went home. Pierre a appelé Jean avant qu’il rentre à la maison.

These crosslinguistic differences could be the result of speakers being fine-tuned to the frequencies of interpretations in their language (e.g. Mitchell et al. 1995). These frequencies seem, however, not to be arbitrary but rather to depend on the availability of close alternative constructions for one of the possible readings, of differences in the grammars of the languages under investigation, or the prosodic structure of a language. In languages like French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, for example, the relative clause can be analysed as a small clause under certain circumstances (a sentence like Leah heard the brother of the clown imitate the magician can be expressed with a relative clause like construction in these languages, according to Grillo and Costa 2014). In these cases, only high attachment of the relative clause is possible. (2b) is thus ambiguous between a relative clause and a so-called pseudo-relative. The pseudo-relative analysis seems to be highly expected in the context of perception verbs so that a high attachment preference is expected for French (and other languages allowing for this kind of analysis). This interpretation is, however, not possible for English. A preference for local attachments will then predict the low attachment preference often found for English (Cuetos and Mitchell 1988). Language differences in (1) and (3) may be explained following a variant of Gricean reasoning (e.g. Grice 1975; Levinson 2000), where comprehenders preferentially expect an interpretation of an ambiguous construction that cannot be expressed by an easily accessible unambiguous alternative. The inverse scope reading in English could easily be expressed with linear scope (Not all children came), while this is not as easily possible in French. Other close alternatives may be available for the inverse scope reading in French (e.g. some came or some didn’t come) but we consider them as pragmatically similar but superficially not close enough to be easily accessible. In the case of pronoun resolution, the explanation is somewhat more complex and will need a refined definition of “availability”. Hemforth et al. (2010) and Baumann, Konieczny, and Hemforth (2014) studied structures similar to (3) in English, French, German, and Portuguese, shown in the examples in (4).

14 | Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth, Saveria Colonna, and Sarah Schimke

(4)

a. b. c. d.

Der Briefträger hat den Straßenfeger getroffen bevor er nach Hause ging. The postman met the street-sweeper before he went home. Le facteur a rencontré le balayeur avant qu’il rentre à la maison. O carteiro encontrou o gari antes que ele fosse para casa.

They ran questionnaire studies in all four languages where participants had to fill went home with their preferred antecedent the gap in a paraphrase like The (postman or street-sweeper). While a strong or moderate preference for the subject of the main clause as antecedent of the pronoun was established for German and English, respectively, French and Portuguese speakers showed an equally robust preference for the object antecedent. The French and Portuguese preference patterns clearly go against a general preference for subject antecedents as it has been established for many languages (e.g. Bouma and Hopp 2007, for German; Kaiser and Trueswell 2008; Kaiser 2011, for Finnish). It can, however, be explained by the existence of an infinitival construction that only allows for subject antecedents, illustrated in (5). (5)

a. b.

Le facteur a rencontré le balayeur avant de rentrer à la maison. O carteiro encontrou o gari antes de ir para casa.

No such alternative for subject antecedents exists for German, which explains the differences between German, on the one hand, and French and Portuguese, on the other hand. The case for English is somewhat more complicated since English has a close alternative structure for subject antecedents (6). However, English speakers seem to prefer subject antecedents in constructions like (4). (6)

The postman met the street-sweeper before going home.

An explanation for this observation is that not only the existence of an alternative construction needs to be taken into account but also its actual availability in the processing situation. This availability can be influenced by several factors such as the general frequency of the alternative construction or the local frequency (for example in the context of an experiment). Baumann, Konieczny, and Hemforth (2014) present three corpus studies, showing that the antes deconstruction in Portuguese and the avant de-construction in French are much more frequent compared to the corresponding subordinate clauses (antes que, avant que) with a ratio of 9.91 in Portuguese and 1.58 in French while the opposite is true for English (0.23). Thus, only alternatives that are easily accessible influence the processing of alternative constructions.

The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution | 15

All cases discussed so far concerned constructions with unambiguous or close to unambiguous alternatives (see Baumann, Konieczny, and Hemforth 2014, for a few exceptions). Interestingly, across languages, these alternatives contain zero proforms, which demand or strongly prefer a subject antecedent. On the other hand, the ambiguous constructions showing a preference for object antecedents all have overt pronouns. A somewhat similar case are null and overt pronominal expressions in pro-drop languages like Italian and Spanish (and also Portuguese). Null and overt pronouns in these languages are ambiguous with respect to their antecedent. However, in Italian sentences like (7), Carminati (2002) found a strong preference for subject antecedents with null pronouns and a clear object preference for full pronouns in self-paced reading experiments and in continuation tasks. The availability of two alternative constructions seems to impose a division of labour similar to the constructions discussed earlier. (7)

Quando Mariai è andata a trovare Vanessaj in ospedale, leij / ∅i . . . ‘When Mariai went to visit Vanessaj at the hospital, shej / ∅i . . . ’

Carminati (2002) proposes the position of antecedent hypothesis (PAH) arguing that the null pronoun prefers a syntactically more salient antecedent (in the subject position) than the overt one. This hypothesis is partly in line with various theories proposing a division of labour for referential expressions based on some aspect of salience with the major difference that Carminati insists on the predominance of syntactic salience while others take into account familiarity (Prince 1981), givenness (Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski 1993; see also Runner and Ibarra 2016 for a more detailed discussion), or cognitive accessibility (Givón 1983; Ariel 1990, 1994). The common argument shared by all of these theories is that more salient and accessible antecedents need less specific and more reduced referring expressions. In a series of experiments on pronoun resolution in Spanish, de la Fuente and Hemforth (2013a) find that local availability of the alternative expression may play a role in these cases as well. These experiments were designed to test the role of topic (using speaking of X-constructions) and focus (using it-clefts) on null pronoun resolution in Spanish, both of these compared to a baseline condition using canonical word order (8). For our current purposes, only the baseline condition is of interest. We will come back to effects of left-dislocation and clefting in the next section. The experimental task was the same cloze task as the one employed for English, French, German, and Portuguese. However, in contrast to the experiments described earlier, de la Fuente and Hemforth did not use the connectives antes de que (‘before’) but cuando (‘when’). For cuando, no close alternative to a subordinate clause exists. Baumann, Konieczny, and Hemforth (2014), moreover,

16 | Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth, Saveria Colonna, and Sarah Schimke

did not find any antecedent preference for Portuguese when using quando and an overt pronoun. Interestingly, and against Carminati’s (2002) predictions, de la Fuente and Hemforth (2013) did not find any preference for subject antecedents in a condition with canonical word order as in (8a) (50.4% subject choices, 49.6% object choices) which was used as a baseline condition in the full experiment. (8)

a. b.

Eduardo llamó a Samuel cuando estaba en la oficina. ‘Eduardo called Samuel when ∅ was in the office.’ Eduardo llamó a Samuel cuando él estaba en la oficina. ‘Eduardo called Samuel when he was in the office.’

De la Fuente and Hemforth (2013a) argue that the lack of any preference in the baseline condition may be due to decreased availability of the structural alternative in their experiments. Contrary to all experiments reported for Italian (Carminati 2002; Filiaci 2010; Filiaci, Sorace, and Carreiras 2013) and Spanish (Alonso-Ovalle et al. 2002; Filiaci 2010; Filiaci, Sorace, and Carreiras 2013), de la Fuente and Hemforth did not directly contrast null and overt pronominal expressions in their Experiments 1 and 2: in Experiment 1 only constructions with null pronouns were investigated, in Experiment 2 only object clitics. They did so, however, in Experiment 3 where they used the same experimental sentences as in the canonical baseline condition of the first two experiments but manipulated the nature of the pronoun (null vs. overt). The results of this experiment show a clear preference for subject antecedents with null pronouns (66% subject choices) while overt pronouns (8b) showed the expected preference for object antecedents (63% object choices). These results fully replicate the previously observed division of labour in the processing of null and overt subject pronouns suggesting that sensitivity to the contrast null vs. overt was thus highly increased when both pronominal expressions were available in the same experimental context. Therefore, it seems that not only the general frequency of the alternative construction but also its local availability have an influence on processing. In sum, we suggest that differences in the grammars of languages, in particular the availability of alternative constructions, play an important role in the processing of pronouns. Although preferences may vary considerably across languages, no language specific fine-tuning is necessary to account for the data, once the grammar of the language and general processing strategies are taken into account. Close alternative constructions in a language are assumed to play a major role, but only when they are highly available at the moment of processing.

The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution | 17

3 Within- and between-sentence relations The work we presented so far was only concerned with cases where the pronominal expression was placed in a subordinate clause and could find its antecedent in the main clause of the very same sentence. There are, however, good reasons to believe that within- and between-sentence pronoun resolution may work very differently (see also Runner and Ibarra 2016 for a similar argument). Hemforth et al. (2010) and Baumann, Konieczny, and Hemforth (2014) directly compared within-sentence pronoun resolution and between-sentence pronoun resolution, as in (9). In all languages, participants preferentially chose subject antecedents for the pronoun in the second sentence (er/he/il). This lack of language specific differences makes sense when the observed differences in withinsentence pronoun resolution are due to syntactic alternatives, which should not play any role between sentences. (9)

a. b. c. d.

Der Briefträger hat den Straßenfeger getroffen. Dann ging er nach Hause. The postman met the street-sweeper. Then he went home. Le facteur a rencontré le balayeur. Puis il est rentré à la maison. O carteiro encontrou o gari. Depois ele fosse para casa.

Different preference patterns within and between sentences may also explain inconsistent results in the psycholinguistic literature as discussed by Colonna, Schimke, and Hemforth (2012) and Runner and Ibarra (2016). However, there are few attempts, which have tried to find a comprehensive and systematized explanation for these different patterns. Miltsakaki’s (2002) “aposynthetic” model of pronoun resolution is one of the few that explicitly put forward differences in processing within and between discourse units (or “Centering Update Units” in her terminology, defined as consisting of a matrix clause and all the dependent clauses associated with it). She proposes a division of labour in the interpretation of pronominal expressions within and across sentence boundaries, whereby inter-sentential pronoun resolution is subject to structural constraints, while intra-sentential pronoun resolution is subject to semantic/pragmatic constraints. More specifically, this model argues that topic continuity is evaluated using a salience mechanism that operates across centering update units and where grammatical function determines the relative salience of entities (similar to Carminati, 2002). Within a centering update unit, pronoun resolution is constrained semantically by the focusing properties of elements like verbs and connectives. In a sentence continuation experiment using examples like (10), she found a stronger preference for subject antecedents in the

18 | Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth, Saveria Colonna, and Sarah Schimke

between-sentence conditions (10a), (10c) than in the within-sentence conditions (10b), (10d). (10)

a. b. c. d.

The groom hit the best man violently. However, he . . . The groom hit the best man violently although he . . . The groom hit the best man violently. Then, he . . . The groom hit the best man violently when he . . .

While we generally agree with Miltsakaki (2002) that discourse units (DUs) play an important role in pronoun resolution, in the following, we will summarize evidence from recent studies, showing that the distinctions proposed by Miltsakaki cannot be sufficient. First, we will show that salience-based preferences cannot be reduced to grammatical function. Hanging-topic left-dislocation and clefting can also increase the accessibility of an antecedent. Moreover, Miltsakaki (2002) predicts that salience-based mechanisms only play a role across DUs. We will see, however, that this is not true for left-dislocations. Finally, we will discuss evidence that the semantics of verbs has to be taken into account not only within but also across DUs. We will start with evidence for left-dislocation and clefting as salience enhancing devices across discourse units. In a series of questionnaire and Visual World eye-tracking experiments, Colonna, Schimke, and Hemforth (2015) investigated German cleft-constructions as (11a), (11b). Across sentences, an accessibility enhancing effect for clefted antecedents was found in offline as well as online data compared to preferences for NP1 in a baseline construction (11c). (11)

a. b. c.

Es war Peter, den Hans ohrfeigte. Er war damals Student. ‘It was Peter who John slapped. At the time, he was a student.’ Es war Peter, der Hans ohrfeigte. Er war damals Student. ‘It was Peter who slapped John. At the time, he was a student.’ Peter ohrfeigte Hans. Er war damals Student. ‘Peter slapped John. At the time, he was a student.’

An unpublished German offline questionnaire showed that topicalized antecedents equally enhance antecedent accessibility across sentences. Twenty-two participants (students from the University of Münster) were asked to choose the antecedent of the critical pronoun for 27 sentences like (12a), (12b), (12c) by completing a paraphrase like war damals Student. (‘ was a student at the time.’) similar to earlier experiments. Materials were presented in three lists such that participants never saw the same sentence in different conditions. Choices were analysed with loglinear regression models using the LanguageR package (Baayen 2011). Compared to the baseline condition (12c), topicalization

The role of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in pronoun resolution | 19

enhanced choices for the first NP for topicalized subjects (12b) (baseline=45% NP1 choices, topicalized subjects: 63% NP1 choices, z=-3.91, p