Abstract
When reading sentences with an anaphoric reference to a subject antecedent, repeated-name anaphors result in slower reading times relative to pronouns (the Repeated Name Penalty: RNP), and overt pronouns are read slower than null pronouns (the Overt Pronoun Penalty: OPP). Because in most languages previously tested, the grammatical subject is typically also the discourse topic it remains unclear whether these effects reflect anaphors’ subject-hood or their topic-hood. To address this question we conducted a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese, a language which morphologically marks both subjects and topics overtly. Our results show that both repeated-name topic-subject anaphors and repeated-name non-topic-subject anaphors exhibit the RNP and that both overt-pronoun topic-subject and overt-pronoun non-topic-subject anaphors show the OPP. However, a detailed examination of performance revealed an interaction between the anaphor topic marking, reference form, and the antecedent’s grammatical status, indicating that the effect of the antecedent’s grammatical status is strongest for null pronoun and repeated name subject anaphors and that the overt form most similar to null pronouns is the repeated name topic anaphor. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of anaphor processing.
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Notes
Note that c-command of the anaphor by an antecedent is not an issue here, since the antecedents are properly contained in a clause preceding the anaphor. Neither is absolute syntactic prominence on the part of an antecedent at play, since the antecedent in the second case is contained within the PP in John’s opinion and commands nothing outside of it.
Note that topic wa can also be used to indicate topic-hood for nominals having other grammatical/semantic functions. In some cases, as with the ni marked by-phrase in a passive, the wa postposition must be added to the grammatical postposition ni, rather than replacing it.
In other instances, as with ni-marked indirect objects, wa may replace or follow the postposition ni.
However, for ga and o marked nominals (i.e. subjects and direct objects), wa must replace the grammatical marker.
An exception to this use of NP-ga is when it is used to mark an exhaustively focused NP.
‘The teachers and the students arrived early, but it was the students who stayed late.’
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Acknowledgments
Research reported in this paper was supported by Study-abroad Scholarship from Mie Prefectural Government to SS and NSF BCS0822617 Grant to AA. In addition, the authors thank the Japanese Language School in Charlotte, the South Carolina Japanese Language Supplementary School and Japanese international students at the English Programs for Internationals and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for their help with data collection.
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Shoji, S., Dubinsky, S. & Almor, A. The Repeated Name Penalty, the Overt Pronoun Penalty, and Topic in Japanese. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 89–106 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9424-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9424-4