Pronouns, Passives, and Discourse Coherence

Abstract Four experiments examined how pronominalization of entities in different grammatical roles interacts with sentence structure (active vs passive) to promote local coherence in discourse. These experiments were conducted to evaluate and extend the centering theory of local discourse structure. A central postulate of this approach is that every sentence in a locally coherent discourse realizes a single semantic entity (the backward-looking center) that provides a link to the preceding utterance, and that the backward-looking center must be realized as a pronoun for this coherence function to be served. Recent research using self-paced reading time has supported this postulate by showing that in certain circumstances sentences in short discourses are read more slowly when they use repeated names rather than pronouns. The current experiments show that this repeated-name penalty does not depend on the thematic role (semantic function) of an entity in a sentence. Rather, it occurs for the entity realized by the grammatical subject of a sentence, independent of thematic role, if that entity was also realized in the preceding sentence. If the entity realized by the grammatical subject is new to the discourse, then the repeated-name penalty occurs for the direct object of a sentence. This suggests that the backward-looking center is determined by a hierarchy of grammatical roles.