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On the impact of clause order on pronoun resolution: evidence from Spanish

  • Núria de Rocafiguera ORCID logo EMAIL logo and Aurora Bel ORCID logo
Published/Copyright: November 29, 2021

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.


Corresponding author: Núria de Rocafiguera, Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, E-mail:

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.

  1. 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).

Appendix

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
linkThresholdnobslogLikAICnitermax.gradcond.H
logitFlexible1,565−1839.613,721.222,379(13,891)2.79E−038.20E+02
Random effects:
GroupsNameVarianceStd. Dev.Corr
item(Intercept)0.44420.6665
ID(Intercept)1.08711.0427
clauseorderSubMain1.37821.174−0.392
pronounOvert2.11631.4548−0.3660.078
clauseorderSubMain:pronounOvert1.35471.16390.091−0.579−0.142
Number of groups: item 64, ID 49
Coefficients:
EstimateStd. Errorz valuePr(>|z|)
clauseorderSubMain−1.481960.45275−3.2730.001063**
pronounOvert0.200320.486870.4110.680752
antecedentSubject−0.060720.48892−0.1240.901167
clauseorderSubMain:pronounOvert1.435950.59852.3990.016429*
clauseorderSubMain:antecedentSubject3.944670.670545.8834.03E-09***
pronounOvert:antecedentSubject−1.282590.69044−1.8580.06322.
clauseorderSubMain:pronounOvert:antecedentSubject−3.287510.86594−3.7960.000147***
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1




(continued)
Threshold coefficients:
EstimateStd. Errorz value
1|2−2.33270.3531−6.606
2|3−0.73760.3471−2.125
3|40.91510.34712.636

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Received: 2021-06-01
Accepted: 2021-10-05
Published Online: 2021-11-29
Published in Print: 2022-04-26

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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