The Effect of Thematic Roles on Pronoun Use and Frequency of Reference Continuation

Goal and source thematic roles have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, an effect that has been linked to the reader's tendency to focus on the consequences of the event (Stevenson, Crawley, & Kleinman, 1994). Using a story continuation experiment, I show that speakers also tend to use pronouns more often for goal entities than source entities. Furthermore, the experiment and a corpus analysis reveal that speakers tend to refer more frequently to goal entities than source entities overall. I use the parallel findings about pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation to argue that referent accessibility is influenced by the comprehender's estimate of the likelihood that a referent will be continued in the discourse.