Abstract
Like many other processes in language comprehension, anaphora resolution is determined by what is said. But is this all? Or to what extent is anaphora resolution also influenced by what is not said but could have been said? We present a questionnaire, a self-paced reading study and a corpus analysis, suggesting that the existence of possible alternative constructions and referring expressions helps to constitute preferences for anaphora in referentially ambiguous sentences and also affects online sentence processing. These disambiguating effects may be understood as conversational implicatures licensed by pragmatic principles.
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Notes
- 1.
In German, co-reference of a subject pronoun with a preceding object antecedent can be expressed by using a different referring expression, namely the demonstrative dieser (‘this (one)’):
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(5)
Der Polizist hat den Briefträger getroffen, bevor dieser nach Hause ging. The policeman met the postman before this (one) went home.
For empirical evidence for this non-subject bias of German demonstratives, see Bosch et al. (2007).
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(5)
- 2.
Analyses were carried out using the statistical software R (www.r-project.org) and the lme4 package for mixed-effects models.
- 3.
Available at http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Linger/.
- 4.
In Portuguese, it is possible to (optionally) express number and person in an infinitive. In this analysis, sentences containing these personal infinitives were not counted as sentences with the alternative construction.
- 5.
A stop list was used to exclude words like something, nothing, king, etc., which are not derived from verbs.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Daniel Müller-Feldmeth and Christoph Wolk for many fruitful discussions. We are very grateful to all the volunteers who participated in our experiments, and to Padre Hugo dos Santos, Catarina Matos Correia and Frederico Fiúza, who helped recruiting them.
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Baumann, P., Konieczny, L., Hemforth, B. (2014). Conversational Implicatures in Anaphora Resolution: Alternative Constructions and Referring Expressions. In: Hemforth, B., Mertins, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds) Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3_8
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