engleski

Pronoun reference resolution in a pro-drop language

Accessibility is thought to be the main factor for the reference resolution of a pronoun. One of the factors that defines the accessibility is word order. The reference of a pronoun is more likely to be the subject or the first mentioned noun as in The father goes fishing with his son. He... where he is more likely to be the father. In this study we checked these claims in an eyetracking experiment with Croatian sentences varying in the presence of the relevant pronoun. Croatian is a pro-drop language, therefore in the examples above the pronouns would not necessarily be present. Indeed, preliminary data show that around 1/3 of the participants switch reference from father to son in a non-default non-pro-drop situation. Contextual information (in this experiment the availability of the relevant information on a picture) contributes to the gaze switch that indicates different resolution of the reference ambiguity. Therefore, in Croatian the reference resolution of a pronoun is strongly influenced not by grammatical information (word order, thematic role information etc.), but by pragmatic or contextual factors. Speakers tend to attribute a function to every part of an utterance: non-default explicit pronoun indicates the reference shift, although there is no grammatical justification for it.

eyetracking; pronoun reference resolution; pro-drop

nije evidentirano