Conversational Implicatures in Anaphora Resolution: Alternative Constructions and Referring Expressions

Like many other processes in language comprehension, anaphora resolution is determined by what is said. But is this all? Or to what extent is anaphora resolution also influenced by what is not said but could have been said? We present a questionnaire, a self-paced reading study and a corpus analysis, suggesting that the existence of possible alternative constructions and referring expressions helps to constitute preferences for anaphora in referentially ambiguous sentences and also affects online sentence processing. These disambiguating effects may be understood as conversational implicatures licensed by pragmatic principles.

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