Pragmatic expectations and coreference: how alternative constructions and referring expressions can serve as cues

Pragmatic expectations and coreference: how alternative constructions and referring expressions can serve as cues Peter Baumann (peter.baumann@mars.uni-freiburg.de) Department of Romance Languages and Literature, University of Freiburg, Platz der Universitat 3 D-79098 Freiburg i. Br., Germany Lars Konieczny (lars@cognition.uni-freiburg.de) Center for Cognitive Science, University of Freiburg, Friedrichstr. 50 D-79098 Freiburg i. Br., Germany Barbara Hemforth (barbara.hemforth@parisdescartes.fr) Laboratoire de Psychologie et de Neuropsychologie Cognitives, CNRS, Universite Paris Descartes, 71 ave Edouard Vaillant, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, France Abstract This paper addresses the question whether possible alternative constructions and alternative choices of referring expressions influence the resolution of anaphoric expressions. We present a questionnaire, a self-paced reading study and a corpus anal- ysis, suggesting that alternative constructions and referring ex- pressions help to constitute preferences for anaphora in refer- entially ambiguous sentences and also affect on-line sentence processing. Keywords: Anaphora resolution, pragmatics, conversational implicatures, pronouns, sentence processing Introduction In many languages, the interpretation of non-reflexive pro- nouns is sensitive to a variety of factors. On the structural and syntactic level, there is evidence indicating a general prefer- ence for the first-mentioned antecedent (Gernsbacher & Har- greaves, 1988) and for the subject (Jarvikivi, Gompel, Hyona, & Bertram, 2005), while on the pragmatic/discourse level, topicality (Givon, 1983), the chain of causality, and general discourse relations (Sanders, 1997; Kehler, 2002) have been shown to influence anaphora resolution. One may thus ar- gue that anaphora resolution is driven by the interaction of grammatical rules and pragmatic constraints, with the former being language-specific and the latter reflecting general prin- ciples of human cognition (cf. Thornton, Gil, & MacDonald, One prominent set of pragmatic constraints are the conver- sational maxims formulated by Grice (1975), which listeners rely on and speakers exploit to convey meaning beyond the level of what is actually said. Out of the four maxims, two are of special interest here: the maxim of quantity (‘do not make your contribution more informative than is required’) and the maxim of manner (‘avoid ambiguity’). They are the basis for most conversational implicatures used to describe the roles of different referring expressions in anaphora resolution. One such example is the contrast between pronouns and reflexives in English (Levinson, 1987): reflexives are more informative than pronouns in the sense that they entail immediate coref- erence and are to be bound within the local domain. When hearing a pronoun, a listener can thus infer that the speaker does not mean immediate coreference, because if so he would have used a reflexive. While most work on conversational implicatures in anaphora resolution focuses on the role of alternative refer- ring expressions, we would like to suggest that implicatures can also be formed on the basis of constructions, more specif- ically on possible alternative constructions that were not used. Alternative Constructions For the domain of relative clause attachment one such exam- ple of a conversational implicature based on alternative con- structions can be found in Frazier and Clifton (1996): in or- der to explain why in sentences like (1) English shows low attachment (i.e. the colonel had an accident), while Spanish and many other languages prefer high attachment (as reported by Mitchell, Cuetos, & Corley, 1992), one may consider that English has an alternative construction to unambiguously ex- press high attachment: the Saxon genitive (2). An English listener can presuppose that the speaker obeys the Gricean maxim of manner and chooses the most appropriate construc- tion. In the referentially ambiguous sentence (1a), the listener can thus assume that the speaker intended a low-attachment reading, because he could have used the alternative construc- tion to unambigously express high attachment. For a Spanish speaker, on the other hand, there is only one way to express sentence (1b), and so the listener must assume that the more ‘prominent’ attachment site was intended by the speaker. (1) a. b. The daughter of the colonel who had an accident . . . La hija del coronel que tuvo un accidente . . . The colonel’s daughter who had an accident . . . First evidence that alternative constructions might also play a role in anaphora resolution was presented by Hemforth, Colonna, Pynte, and Konieczny (2004). In a cross-linguistic comparison they showed that sentences like (3) are inter- preted differently in German and French: while Germans consider the subject ‘Polizist’ (‘policeman’) as the antecedent of the pronoun, speakers of French prefer the object ‘facteur’ (‘postman’).