TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bader, Markus
A1  - Portele, Yvonne
T1  - The interpretation of german personal pronouns and d-pronouns
T2  - Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
N2  - Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.
KW  - pronoun resolution
KW  - personal pronoun
KW  - d-pronoun
KW  - language comprehension
KW  - language production
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/56485
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-564857
SN  - 1613-3706
SN  - 0721-9067
VL  - 38.2019
IS  - 2
SP  - 155
EP  - 190
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin [u.a.]
ER  -