Interpretation preferences in contexts with three antecedents: examining the role of prominence in German pronouns

This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and “dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied psycholinguistics Vol. 42; no. 6; pp. 1427 - 1461
Main Authors Patterson, Clare, Schumacher, Petra B.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.11.2021
Subjects
Antecedents
Demonstratives
German language
Investigations
Labor
Language Variation
Original Article
Preferences
Pronouns
Psycholinguistics
Reference (Semantic)
Thematic roles
Word Order
reference
pronoun resolution
demonstratives
prominence
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Summary:This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and “dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” involves computing a prominence hierarchy of the prior referents, and excluding the referent with the highest prominence rank. The demonstrative “dieser” has not been extensively tested. In the current study, personal and demonstrative pronominal forms were investigated following ditransitive contexts, where three potential antecedents are available, in two rating experiments. The personal pronoun showed flexibility in that it received equally high ratings for all three antecedents in canonical configurations. The ratings for dieser followed a graded sensitivity to thematic role prominence, with lowest scores when referring to prominent antecedents (agents) and the highest scores for the least prominent antecedents (patients), with scores for the medium prominence candidate (recipients) differing from both. Der followed a similar but not identical pattern, with a less marked difference between lower prominence candidates. Positional information also has a strong influence on demonstratives. In sum, final interpretation is sensitive to fine-grained differences in prominence hierarchies.
ISSN:0142-7164
1469-1817
DOI:10.1017/S0142716421000291