The Role of Prominence in the Resolution of Referential Ambiguities

The Role of Prominence in the Resolution of Referential Ambiguities: Evidence from Co-Reference in Italian
Ilaria Frana (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
[email protected]
In this paper, I investigate the role of discourse prominence in the resolution of referential ambiguities for anaphoric pronouns
and relational nouns (RNs) in Italian. I advance the hypothesis that, in case of referential ambiguity (when more than one
discourse referent qualifies as possible antecedent), the preferred antecedent for a pronoun (or RN) is the most prominent
discourse referent available. I will refer to this hypothesis as the Discourse-Prominence Hypothesis of Antecedent Assignment
(DPH). To support the DPH, I present evidence from two questionnaire studies on intra-sentential anaphora and RNs in Italian.
Carminati (2002) found that in case of referential ambiguities, as in (1), a null pronoun (pro) prefers to retrieve an antecedent
in the Spec-IP 82% of the time. The DPH claims that Carminati’s findings are not due to a syntactic position effect, but merely
correlate with syntactic position, as Spec-IP is the preferred location of the most prominent discourse referent (or Topic).
Experiment 1 investigated the DPH with respect to pronoun resolution. Discourse prominence was modified by the presence
or absence of a clitic pronoun. (2) exemplifies the two conditions. In (2a), the clitic pronoun la changes the prominence
ordering in the set of discourse referents by reactivating the entity it refers to (Rossi) and thus promoting it as current Topic. In
this case, the DPH predicts that the preference for Spec-IP (Maria) should be overridden and pro should be preferably linked
to the Topic-DP in object position, rather than the non-Topic DP in Spec-IP. The experiment had a counterbalanced between
subjects design. 32 subjects read 20 sentences (plus 20 fillers) and answered a multiple-choice question indicating their
interpretation of the pronoun. The experimental items were of the form illustrated in (2a-b). The critical manipulation was the
way in which the subject of the first sentence was realized in the second sentence: clitic-pronoun vs. repeated name (following
Gordon et al (1993), I assume that repeated names do not have any ‘reactivation’ force). The results showed clear support for
the DPH: in the clitic-condition, the Spec-IP of the second sentence was chosen as antecedent 35% of the time, compared to
71% in the non-clitic condition (a t-test showed this difference to be significant both by subject and by item (p < .001)).
RNs, like author, brother, etc. have been argued to have an unexpressed variable in their lexical representation (Stanley
2000). In Experiment 2, I investigated the processing of RNs to determine whether the assignment of a value to this variable is
also influenced by the prominence status of discourse referents. The same manipulation strategy (clitic vs. repeated name)
was used (see (3)). The results of this experiment show a numerical, though non-significant trend parallel to the results in
Experiment 1 (continuations favoring R1=65% in the clitic-condition vs. 43% in the non-clitic-condition).
Overall, both experiments provide evidence against a purely syntactic account of referential ambiguity resolutions and support
the idea that information about the prominence status of discourse referents influences the processor in referential
ambiguities.
(1)
Marta scriveva frequentemente a Piera quando pro era negli Stati Uniti.
Marta wrote frequently
to Piera when pro was in the United States.
(2) a.
La signora Rossi è una persona molto maleducata che non merita alcun riguardo. Quando Maria la incontra per
strada, pro fa sempre finta di non vederla.
‘Mrs Rossi is a very rude person that does not deserve any regard. When Mary her-sees in the street, pro pretends
not to see her.’
b.
(3)
La signora Rossi è una persona molto maleducata che non merita alcun riguardo. Quando Maria incontra la signora
Rossi per strada, pro fa sempre finta di non vederla.
‘Mrs Rossi is a very rude person that does not deserve any regard. When Mary sees Mrs Rossi in the street, pro
pretends not to see her.’
Britney Spears era ai Grammy Awards quest'anno. Quando Christina Alguilera l'ha insultata /ha insultato Britney
Spears/ davanti ai giornalisti, i fans…
‘Britney Spears was at the Grammy Awards this year.‘When Christina Alguilera her insulted/insulted Britney Spears/
in front of the journalists, the fans’…
a. non hanno gradito
..didn’t appreciate it
b. hanno applaudito
…clapped
References
Carminati, M. (2002): The Processing of Italian subject pronouns. Doctoral Dissertation, UMass Amherst, Amherst, MA.
Gordon et al. (1993): “Pronouns, names and the centering of attention in discourse”, Cognitive Science, 17: 311-347.
Stanley, J. (2000): “Context and Logical Form”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 23: 391-434.