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Is he a book? Animacy restrictions of the overt pronoun in European Portuguese

Authors:

Abstract

Like other null-subject languages, European Portuguese (EP) has two types of subject pronouns (null and overt pronouns) that differ in their preferences to retrieve antecedents. Several studies have shown different syntactic and semantic biases for each pronominal form, either in EP or in other null-subject languages. The findings have been explained by the Antecedent Position Hypothesis (Carminati, 2002), (APH): the null pronoun prefers an antecedent in the Spec IP position while the overt pronoun prefers an antecedent in other syntactic positions. However, other properties that may constrain the interpretation of the pronouns have received less attention in the literature. One of those is the animacy of the antecedents. Unlike English, EP does not have a specific pronoun for inanimate entities and both pronominal forms can, theoretically, retrieve them.
Is he a book? Animacy restrictions of the overt pronoun in
European Portuguese
Sara Morgado1
saramorgado@yahoo.com Maria Lobo1
maria.lobo@fcsh.unl.pt Paula Luegi2
paulaluegi@letras.ulisboa.pt
1CLUNL/FCSH Universidade NOVA de Lisboa 2Universidade de Lisboa CLUL
23rd AMLaP, Lancaster, UK, September 7-9, 2017
Introduction
Accessibility Theory (Ariel, 1990): more accessible entities are referred to with less
explicit anaphoric expressions
In null subject languages (e.g., Carminati, 2002, among many others): null subject
pronoun subject (Spec-IP position) while overt subject pronoun object
(non-Spec-IP position)
The impact of syntactic function has been widely studied, but other factors like
antecedents lexical properties, such as animacy, have not: Studies usually only test
human or, at least, animate antecedents (John,the doctor,Mickey)
Kaiser & Trueswell (2008) propose the form-specific multiple constraints account:
Salience is not a monolithic concept, and not only different pronominal forms are
sensitive to different factors, but also different factors are unequally weighed
What is the impact, on different anaphoric expressions, of antecedents animacy?
Previous studies have shown that animacy:
Might be organised on a scale or hierarchy (Human >Animate >Inanimate)
(Yamamoto, 1999) and this hierarchy has an impact on accessibility in memory:
Animate entities are more accessible in the discourse representation (e.g., Bock &
Warren, 1985)
Has an impact on relative pronoun interpretation (and production) with complex
NPs: Attachment site depends on the lexical properties (animacy and concreteness)
of the available NPs (Desmet, Baecke, Drieghe, Brysbaert, & Vonk, 2006)
Research questions
1Does animacy have an impact on pronoun resolution in European Portuguese
(EP)?
2Is animacy hierarchy reflected in the Accessibility Theory so that more explicit
anaphoric forms (such as overt pronouns) are preferably associated with less
accessible (inanimate) antecedents?
Previous studies
Fukumura & van Gompel (2011) (production study, in English): animate antecedents are
more frequently chosen to be the subject of the following sentence and they are more
frequently referred to by a pronoun than inanimate ones
Vogels, Maes, & Krahmer (2014) (production study, in Dutch): pronouns (more than other
anaphoric expressions) are used to refer to animate antecedents, but:
Reduced pronouns are used to refer to (less accessible) inanimate antecedents
Full pronouns are used to refer to (more accessible) animate antecedents
Costa, Faria, & Matos (1998) (interpretation study, in EP): null pronouns are preferably
interpreted (compared to overt pronouns) as referring back to inanimate (compared
to animate) antecedents in object position
Barbosa, Duarte, & Kato (2005) (corpora study, in EP and BP): in EP, unlike Brazilian
Portuguese, overt pronouns tend to refer back only to animate antecedents
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia with a PhD scholarship to Sara Morgado
(SFRH/BD/52264/2013) and a Post-Doc scholarship to Paula Luegi (SFRH/BPD/84138/2012) and with funds from the
projects: PEst-OE/LIN/UI3213/2014 and UID/LIN/00214/2013.
Methods
Participants: 26 native speakers of European Portuguese attending undergraduate
courses at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Materials: 24 experimental sentences in two conditions: animate vs. inanimate
antecedent in object position (pronoun interpretation was forced by gender
agreement) + 48 fillers
(1) Depois de a instrutora pintar o recruta/capacete no exercício militar, ele
ficou camuflado no meio da vegetação.
After the instructorfem painted the recruitmasc/helmetmasc in the milittary
training, hemasc was concealed among the vegetation.
Procedure: Self-paced moving window paradigm (using PsychoPy software) with a
final yes/no comprehension question
Analysis: accuracy of answer and reaction time on: pronoun region (critical region),
auxiliary verb region (post-critical region), and on question answering
Additional information
Only overt pronouns were tested in this study
Antecedents were all in object position
EP has no special form to refer to non-human or inanimate entities
There is no neutral gender in EP: all entities are gender marked and preceded by an article that
gender marks it (pen is feminine (a caneta) while pencil is masculine (o lápis))
*In this study, the term animate is used to refer to any human entity, and inanimate to refer to entities
that are neither human nor animate
Results
Figure 1: Reading times on pronoun and auxiliary verb regions on both animate and inanimate conditions.
Significant effect of animacy at the pronoun region (β= 0.92;SE = 0.37;t= 2.46;
p < 0.01): faster reading times when the overt pronoun is forced to be interpreted as
referring back to an animate antecedent (1.09ms) than when it is forced to be
interpreted as referring back to an inanimate one (1.17ms)
Non-significant effect of animacy at the auxiliary verb region, on accuracy or on time
of answer
Discussion
Answer to research question 1 : YES
Animacy does seem to have an impact on pronoun resolution in EP: Reading times
for pronouns referring back to animate and inanimate antecedents are different
This result is in line with previous research (e.g., Fukumura & van Gompel, 2011;
Vogels et al., 2014)
Answer to research question 2 : (to be answered in future research)
Overt pronouns in EP are preferably interpreted as referring back to the semantic
most prominent antecedent
Possible explanations for the present results (not mutually exclusive):
1There is no inverse relation between animacy prominence and anaphoric forms
explicitness in pronoun interpretation in EP, in line with the production results
from Vogels et al. (2014)
Overt pronouns are not preferably interpreted as referring back to the semantic
less prominent antecedent
2There is an inverse relation between animacy hierarchy and anaphoric forms
explicitness, although only to some degree since animacy is one among other
factors that contribute to salience ascription: The overt pronoun is preferably
interpreted as referring back to the semantic most prominent antecedent among
the syntactic less salient antecedent (Object animate >Object inanimate)
As Kaiser & Trueswell (2008) propose, different factors are differently weighed
and animacy, although having some impact, might have a weaker impact than
syntactic function or just work in interaction with it
3Strong (overt) pronouns are semantically restrained to animate antecedents, as
proposed by Cardinaletti & Starke (1999) and so are not suitable to refer back to
inanimate antecedents
4Inanimate antecedents are overall less acceptable as (anaphoric expression)
antecedents: Pronouns in EP are encoded for natural gender and inanimate
entities only have grammatical gender, therefore, pronouns are not easily assigned
to inanimate entities
Future research
Contrast the interpretation of null and overt pronominal forms (ambiguously)
referring back to animate and inanimate antecedents in an off-line questionnaire and
in a Visual World Paradigm experiment
References
Ariel, M. (1990). Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. Routledge.
Barbosa, P., Duarte, E., & Kato, M. (2005). Null Subjects in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics,4(2), 11-52.
Bock, J. K., & Warren, R. (1985). Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation. Cognition,21, 47-67.
Cardinaletti, A., & Starke, M. (1999). The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In Clitics in the languages
of europe (pp. 145–234). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Carminati, M. N. (2002). The processing of Italian subject pronouns (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).
Costa, M. A., Faria, I. H., & Matos, G. (1998). Ambiguidade referencial na identificação do sujeito em estruturas coordenadas. Actas do XII Encontro
Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, 1997, 173-188.
Desmet, T., Baecke, C. D., Drieghe, D., Brysbaert, M., & Vonk, W. (2006). Relative clause attachment in dutch: On-line comprehension corresponds
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Fukumura, K., & van Gompel, R. (2011). The effect of animacy on the choice of referring expression. Language and Cognitive Processes,26(10),
1472-1504.
Kaiser, E., & Trueswell, J. (2008). Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution.
Language and Cognitive Processes,23(5), 709-748.
Vogels, J., Maes, A., & Krahmer, E. (2014). Choosing referring expressions in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: Effects of animacy. Lingua,145,
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Yamamoto, M. (1999). Animacy and Reference: a cognitive approach to corpus linguistics. John Benjamins.
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