Abstract
In research on intra-sentential pronominal anaphora resolution in null subject languages, it has been argued that null pronouns tend to be biased towards subject antecedents, whereas overt pronouns tend to prefer object antecedents, as predicted by Carminati’s ‘Position of the Antecedent Hypothesis’. However, these studies have mainly focused on only one of the two possible clause orders (main-subordinate or subordinate-main), which have not been overtly contrasted. This paper investigates the effects of clause order on the interpretation of third-person subject pronouns in globally ambiguous intra-sentential contexts by 49 native speakers of Spanish. The results of an acceptability judgment task explicitly comparing both clause orders indicate that relative clause order is a key factor affecting the interpretation of pronouns: while a preference of overt pronouns for object antecedents holds across clause orders, null pronouns show a bias towards subject antecedents only in subordinate-main sequences. These findings refine the Position of the Antecedent Hypothesis predictions by restricting them to subordinate-main complex sentences.
Funding source: Spanish State Research Agency
Award Identifier / Grant number: FFI2016-75082-P
Award Identifier / Grant number: PID2020-114276GB-I00
Funding source: Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research
Award Identifier / Grant number: 2020FI_B2_00081
Acknowledgments
We thank all the participants of the study, as well as Estela García-Alcaraz and Raquel Fernández-Fuertes for their invaluable help in recruiting participants and collecting data. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
Research funding: This research has been supported by research grants awarded by the Spanish State Research Agency (FFI2016-75082-P and PID2020-114276GB-I00) and by the Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants through the FI program (2020FI_B2_00081).
Summary of the reported model (main-subordinate clause order, null pronoun and object antecedent were modeled with the intercept):
| Cumulative Link Mixed Model fitted with the Laplace approximation | |||||||
| formula: values ∼ clauseorder * pronoun * antecedent + (1 | item) + (1 + clauseorder * pronoun | ID) | |||||||
| data: data | |||||||
| link | Threshold | nobs | logLik | AIC | niter | max.grad | cond.H |
| logit | Flexible | 1,565 | −1839.61 | 3,721.22 | 2,379(13,891) | 2.79E−03 | 8.20E+02 |
| Random effects: | ||||||
| Groups | Name | Variance | Std. Dev. | Corr | ||
| item | (Intercept) | 0.4442 | 0.6665 | |||
| ID | (Intercept) | 1.0871 | 1.0427 | |||
| clauseorderSubMain | 1.3782 | 1.174 | −0.392 | |||
| pronounOvert | 2.1163 | 1.4548 | −0.366 | 0.078 | ||
| clauseorderSubMain:pronounOvert | 1.3547 | 1.1639 | 0.091 | −0.579 | −0.142 | |
| Number of groups: item 64, ID 49 | ||||||
| Coefficients: | |||||
| Estimate | Std. Error | z value | Pr(>|z|) | ||
| clauseorderSubMain | −1.48196 | 0.45275 | −3.273 | 0.001063 | ** |
| pronounOvert | 0.20032 | 0.48687 | 0.411 | 0.680752 | |
| antecedentSubject | −0.06072 | 0.48892 | −0.124 | 0.901167 | |
| clauseorderSubMain:pronounOvert | 1.43595 | 0.5985 | 2.399 | 0.016429 | * |
| clauseorderSubMain:antecedentSubject | 3.94467 | 0.67054 | 5.883 | 4.03E-09 | *** |
| pronounOvert:antecedentSubject | −1.28259 | 0.69044 | −1.858 | 0.06322 | . |
| clauseorderSubMain:pronounOvert:antecedentSubject | −3.28751 | 0.86594 | −3.796 | 0.000147 | *** |
| Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 | |||||
| (continued) | ||||
| Threshold coefficients: | ||||
| Estimate | Std. Error | z value | ||
| 1|2 | −2.3327 | 0.3531 | −6.606 | |
| 2|3 | −0.7376 | 0.3471 | −2.125 | |
| 3|4 | 0.9151 | 0.3471 | 2.636 | |
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- On the impact of clause order on pronoun resolution: evidence from Spanish
- Establishing a Sprachbund in the Western Lingnan region: conceptual and methodological issues
- Phonaesthemic alternations in Flemish dialects: a matter of language contact in the emergence of phonaesthesia?
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- Toward a functional typology of adpositions: theoretical implications
- Expanding the dative semantic map: the functions of the postposition =rā in the Tātic language group
- Intonation as a cue to epistemic stance in one type of insubordinate clauses
- Book Reviews
- Gordon Tucker, Guowen Huang, Lise Fontaine & Edward McDonald: Approaches to Systemic Functional Grammar: Convergence and divergence
- Christoph Rühlemann: Visual linguistics with R: A practical introduction to quantitative interactional linguistics
- Xinren Chen: Exploring identity work in Chinese communication
- Pietro Bortone: Language and nationality: Social inferences, cultural differences, and linguistic misconceptions
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- On the impact of clause order on pronoun resolution: evidence from Spanish
- Establishing a Sprachbund in the Western Lingnan region: conceptual and methodological issues
- Phonaesthemic alternations in Flemish dialects: a matter of language contact in the emergence of phonaesthesia?
- Phonotactic conditions and morphotactic transparency in Mirandese word formation
- Toward a functional typology of adpositions: theoretical implications
- Expanding the dative semantic map: the functions of the postposition =rā in the Tātic language group
- Intonation as a cue to epistemic stance in one type of insubordinate clauses
- Book Reviews
- Gordon Tucker, Guowen Huang, Lise Fontaine & Edward McDonald: Approaches to Systemic Functional Grammar: Convergence and divergence
- Christoph Rühlemann: Visual linguistics with R: A practical introduction to quantitative interactional linguistics
- Xinren Chen: Exploring identity work in Chinese communication
- Pietro Bortone: Language and nationality: Social inferences, cultural differences, and linguistic misconceptions