Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Previous studies have shown that online pronoun resolution is affected by various phonological, syntactic, and semantic properties of a pronoun’s antecedent (Arnold, 2001; Levy, 2008; Kehler, Kertz, Rohde, & Elman, 2008), which contribute differently to the salience of a referent. It assumed that the more salient a referent is, the more likely it will be realized as a pronoun (Kaiser, 2011). We provide novel evidence from an eye-tracking experiment on German that the interaction of two semantic and discourse pragmatic parameters, which have been neglected in previous analyses, contribute to the salience structure as well. These parameter are: (i) the definiteness of a noun phrase, as indicated by the definite vs. indefinite article, and (ii) the givenness status of the associated discourse referent, as indicated by inferred or bridged vs. brand-new status (Prince 1981). We show that the interaction of these two parameters affect a referent’s availability for subsequent re-mention in a discourse by a pronoun.