Information structure effects on anaphora resolution in German and French: A crosslinguistic study of pronoun resolution
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Saveria Colonna,
,
Sarah Schimke,
Abstract
This paper presents an off-line study consisting of five questionnaires in which we observed interpretational preferences for ambiguous intra-sentential pronouns in parallel structures in German and French. We tested the influence of information structural factors, in particular, we compared the effects of topicalizing versus focusing potential antecedents of the ambiguous pronoun. Results replicated a baseline difference between the two languages: a subject preference in German and an object preference in French (Hemforth et al. 2010). We argue that the object preference in French is due to the fact that speakers take into account an alternative nonambiguous construction. In addition, we found that in both languages, topicalization enhances, but focusing reduces the accessibility of antecedents for pronouns in the same sentence. This stands in contrast with previous results showing an equal accessibility of focused and topicalized referents for pronouns in subsequent sentences (Cowles et al. 2007). We explain this difference with the different function of focus within and across sentences.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- Masthead
- Clitic doubling and information structure in Albanian
- Lexicalization of mensural classifiers in Chinese
- Do nominal classifiers mediate selectional restrictions? An investigation of the function of semantically based nominal classifiers in Mawng (Iwaidjan, Australian)
- Information structure effects on anaphora resolution in German and French: A crosslinguistic study of pronoun resolution
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- Book review
- Publications received between 2 June 2011 and 1 June 2012
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Clitic doubling and information structure in Albanian
- Lexicalization of mensural classifiers in Chinese
- Do nominal classifiers mediate selectional restrictions? An investigation of the function of semantically based nominal classifiers in Mawng (Iwaidjan, Australian)
- Information structure effects on anaphora resolution in German and French: A crosslinguistic study of pronoun resolution
- Constraints on noun phrase discontinuity in an Australian language: The role of prosody and information structure
- Book review
- Publications received between 2 June 2011 and 1 June 2012
