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Semantic incorporation and discourse prominence : Experimental evidence from English pronoun resolution

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Authors
Wittenberg, Eva
Trotzke, Andreas
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Keywords
Anaphor
Demonstrative pronouns
Discourse prominence
Event reference
Forced-choice task
Light verb constructions
Noun incorporation
Object reference
Pronoun resolution
Semantic incorporation
Language and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language
Artificial Intelligence
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Wittenberg-Eva2_2021.pdf
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27150
Abstract
The semantic incorporation of nouns into predicates, like give a hug, is not morphologically marked in English, and how syntactic incorporation strategies like light verb constructions influence the discourse-prominence structure of an utterance has not yet been studied systematically. One hypothesis is that since semantically incorporated nouns are not morphosyntactically incorporated in English, they can function like any other noun as prominent and accessible referents for anaphora. Another hypothesis is that their semantic status and their predicative meaning influence their discourse prominence, and hence their accessibility by anaphoric means. We tested these two hypotheses in two experimental studies on different anaphoric preferences of English pronouns. Our studies demonstrate that the felicity patterns for the two different pronominal reference strategies are determined at different linguistic levels: For it, we found an impact of morphosyntactic form; for that, the semantic type of the referent (object vs. event) seems to play a role. Crucially, the degree of semantic incorporation does not affect discourse prominence and pronoun choice to the extent that we had expected.
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Journal article
Date
2021-12
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ISBN
Identifiers
10.1016/j.pragma.2021.09.019
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Cognitive Science