Agentivity drives real-time pronoun resolution: evidence from German 'er' and 'der'

• Petra B. Schumacher ^[1] ; Leah Roberts ^[2] ; Juhani Järvikivi ^[3]
  1. [1] University of Cologne

     University of Cologne

     Kreisfreie Stadt Köln, Alemania

     
  2. [2] University of York

     University of York

     Reino Unido

     
  3. [3] University of Alberta

     University of Alberta

     Canadá

     

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• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 185, 2017, págs. 25-41
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • We report two experiments on the referential resolution of the German subject pronoun er and the demonstrative der (‘he’). Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the effects of grammatical role, thematic role and the information status of potential referents in the antecedent clause operationalized by word-order (canonical/non-canonical), in the context of active–accusative verbs (Exp. 1) and dative-experiencer verbs (Exp. 2). In information-structurally neutral contexts, er prefers the proto-agent and der the proto-patient. This suggests that agentivity is a better predictor for pronoun resolution than subjecthood or sentence topic as previously proposed. It further supports the claim that agentivity is a core property of language processing and it more generally substantiates the proposal from cognitive sciences that agentivity represents core knowledge of the human attentional system. With non-canonical antecedent clauses, because they lack alignment of prominence features, interpretive preferences become less stable, indicating that multiple cues are involved in pronoun resolution. The data further suggest that the demonstrative pronoun elicits more reliable interpretive biases than the personal pronoun