Nominal properties as determinants of subject selection

This paper addresses the issue of how speakers select subject NPs as they produce sentences. Two governing factors which have received wide attention are the Given—New strategy and the speaker's perspective . The question still remains, however, as to whether speakers are differentially sensitive to the kinds of subject nominals they choose. Results of a psycholinguistic experiment indicate that the properties of animacy, concreteness, and frequency all play important roles in speakers' selection of subject nominals. However, high frequency nominals reveal different selection patterns from low frequency ones. It is concluded that not only are the traditionally discussed factors of animacy and concreteness of direct relevance in sentence production, but that frequency, an essentially non-linguistic property, also plays a signficant role.