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Antecedent preferences of Personal Pronouns and Anaphoric Demonstratives in German in Comprehension
Frances Wilson, Frank Keller and Antonella Sorace
University of Edinburgh
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Demonstrative Pronouns ● Demonstrative pronouns can be used anaphorically
● German: personal pronouns – er, sie, es demonstrative pronouns - der, die, das
(1) Der Kellneri erkennt den Detektivk als das The waiter recognizes the detective as the
Bier umgekippt wird. Eri /Derk ist offensichtlich sehr beer tipped over is. He is apparently very
fleißig.hard-working.
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Antecedent preferences of demonstratives
• Diessel (1999): Demonstratives signal a topic shift.
● Grammatical Role: pron - subject, dem – object
● Topichood: pron – topic, dem – non-topic
● Information Structure: pron – old, dem – new
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Previous work
• Focussed on three languages:• Dutch• Finnish• German
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Dutch
● Kaiser and Trueswell (2003)● Topic based approach
● Pronoun – hij ● Demonstrative - die
● Used SVO antecedent sentences only● Sentence completion and visual-world
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● SVO – dem – Object/Non-topic preference
● SVO – pron – Subject/Topic preference
● Can’t separate Grammatical Role and Topic based accounts
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Finnish
● Kaiser and Trueswell (2004)● Grammatical role ● Information structure
● Pronoun – hän● Demonstrative – tämä
● SVO and OVS antecedent sentences● Sentence completion and visual world
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● SVO – dem – Object/Non-topic ● SVO – pron – Subject/Topic
● OVS – dem – No clear preference● OVS – pron – Subject/Non-topic
● Pronouns – sensitive to grammatical role● Demonstratives – both grammatical role
and topichood
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Finnish Information Structure
● SVO sentences have relatively neutral info structure.
● OVS sentences postverbal S refers to NEW information
● In SVO contexts (both dem and pron) early anticipatory effects to NP1, as likely continuation.
● In OVS contexts – for pron there was a sudden shift to NP2 (S), no pref for dem.
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German
● Bosch, Rozario and Zhao (2003)● Grammatical role● Corpus study found that Demonstratives
preferred antecedents with accusative case, and pronouns, nominative antecedents.
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● Bosch, Katz and Umbach
(2a) Im KrankenhausIn hospital.
(2b) Der Oberarzt untersucht den Notfallpatienten.The senior doctor examines the emergency patient.
(2c) Der/Er ist gerade erst gekommen.Dem/He has only just arrived.
(2d) Der ______ ist gerade erst gekommen.
(b) – SVO or OVSReading times, completion, memory questionnaire
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Experiment 1
• Judgement task – rated on a 7 point scale the probability that the two capitalized phrases referred to the same person
(3) DER MANN sieht den Jungen. ER ist sehr müde.
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SVO
OVS
Antecedent Sentence
Anaphoric Sentence
Demonstrative
Pronoun
Pronoun
Demonstrative
Judgement on which NP?
SVO
OVS
OVSOVS
SVOSVOSVO
OVS
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● Participants: Native speakers of German living in Edinburgh
● Sentences displayed using WebExp software
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Pre-verbal NP Post-verbal NP
NP
3.0
3.5
4.0
4.5
5.0
5.5
6.0
Rating
Figure 1: Graph to show antecedent preferences for SVO antecedent sentences
Pronoun or Demonstrative
PronounDemonstrative
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Pre-verbal Post-verbal
NP
3.6
3.8
4.0
4.2
4.4
4.6
4.8
5.0
Rating
Pronoun or Demonstrative
PronounDemonstrative
Figure 2: Graph to show antecedent preferences with OVS antecedent sentence
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● Demonstratives preferred post-verbal antecedents, regardless of grammatical role.
● Personal pronouns preferred Subject antecedents in OVS condition, but had no preference in SVO condition.
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Results ● Similar to Kaiser & Trueswell’s (in press)
results for Finnish● Different anaphors access different levels
of representation● In German Personal pronouns access
both syntax and discourse● But Demonstratives access mainly
discourse
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Potential Problems
● Attrition - all participants were native German speakers living in Edinburgh
● Experiment 1 was offline● Results may have been affected by
presentation of coreference judgement –capitalization may have had an effect.
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Experiment 2 (with Matt Crocker)
● Visual world experiment● Participants resident in Saarbrücken● Materials are intended for use with L2
learners, so “easy” lexical items used.
● Subordinate clause introduced between antecedent and anaphor sentence to distract eye-movements from post-verbal NP
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SVO
OVS
Antecedent Sentence
Anaphoric Sentence
Demonstrative
Pronoun
Pronoun
Demonstrative
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Der Kellner erkennt den Detektiv, als das Bier umgekippt wird. Er/Der ist offensichtlich sehr fleißig.
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Results● Similar to judgement task
● SVO – dem - Object/Non-topic pref● SVO – pro – No preference
● OVS – dem – Object/Non-topic pref● OVS – pro – Object/Non-topic pref
● Dem – discourse factors● Pron – discourse factors and grammatical role
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0-250 250-500
500-750
750-1000
1000-1250
1250-1500
1500-1750
1750-2000
time (ms)
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5Pr
opor
tion
of F
ixat
ions
NPPre-verbalPost-verbal
SVO pro
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0-250 250-500
500-750
750-1000
1000-1250
1250-1500
1500-1750
1750-2000
time (ms)
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
Proportion of fixations
NP
Pre-verbal
Post-verbal
OVS pron
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0-250 250-500
500-750
750-1000
1000-1250
1250-1500
1500-1750
1750-2000
time (ms)
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
Proportion of Fixations
NP
Pre-verbal
Post-verbal
SVO dem
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0-250 250-500
500-750
750-1000
1000-1250
1250-1500
1500-1750
1750-2000
time (ms)
0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
Proportion of Fixations
NP
Pre-verbal
Post-verbal
OVS dem
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Time course
● Pronouns: OVS – early effect● Demonstratives: reach significance late.
● Possibly due to faster processing of syntactic information than discourse information
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Time course of effects
● 3 explanations:− Demonstratives are ambiguous with definite
determiners, delay is due to ambiguity resolution
− Late effects are due to the adjective triggering saccades to the referent
− Difference between processing speed for discourse and syntactic information
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● SVO is earlier than OVS for dem
● Due to the Information Structure of SVO− SVO Post-verbal NP is more likely to be
new info than in OVS● Possibly anticipation of a change in topic● Faster processing of demonstrative in
SVO
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Conclusions
● Different levels of representation are accessed for different types of anaphor
● Clear evidence of cross-linguistic differences
● Problematic for theories of anaphor resolution which do not take this into account, e.g Informational Load Hypothesis
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Selected References● Almor, A. (1999). Noun-phrase anaphora and focus: The
informational load hypothesis. Psychological Review 106, 748-765
● Bosch, P., Katz, G., and Umbach, C. (in press). The non-subject bias of German demonstrative pronouns. To appear in Monika Schwarz-Friesel, Manfred Consten, Mareile Knees (Ed.): Anaphors in Texts.
● Diessel, H. (1999). Demonstratives. Form, function and grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
● Kaiser, E., and Truswell, J. (in press). Investigating the interpretation of pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Going beyond Salience. To appear in E. Gibson & N. Pearlmutter (eds), The processing and acquisition of reference. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.