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Linguistic and cognitive prominence in anaphor resolution: topic, contrastive focus and pronouns

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Abstract

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent.

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Notes

  1. Conceptual prominence may be achieved without linguistic prominence, of course. A referent may be conceptually prominent due to non-linguistic context (e.g. co-presence with the interlocutors). With respect to strictly linguistic contexts, Cornish et al. (2005) found evidence from both French and English that if the antecedent referent is a central or nuclear part of the predicate expressed in previous discourse, it may be referred to using a pronoun even when it has not been explicitly mentioned (and thus is not linguistically present, let alone prominent).

  2. Another diagnostic for topichood, directly related to the aboutness condition, is that a paraphrase of the sentence with “speaking of X”, “as for X”, or “ about X” is felicitous where X is the topic, but not when X is in focus (Gundel 1976; Reinhart 1982). For example, we can see that (a) can be paraphrased as (b).

    1. (a)

      The gophers ate your carrots.

    2. (b)

      As for the gophers, they ate your carrots.

    This “as for” phrase is infelicitous when used with a focus expression, so sentence (c) sounds odd.

    1. (c)

      Who ate my carrots?

       #As for the gophers, they ate your carrots.

    This infelicity is due to the fact that, as discussed above, the informative part of the answer to a wh-question (in this example, gophers) is the focus of the answer, and by placing it in a topic position, it is given (mutually exclusive) status as both topic and focus. However, Lambrecht and others have observed that the use of this question/answer test breaks down somewhat under certain circumstances.

  3. It could be that participants scored these sentence-types similarly because they failed to read the passages carefully. However this seems unlikely because the results do show other differences between conditions in this task. We were careful to make the passages as natural-sounding as possible within the constraints of the experimental design, and these results may reflect this.

  4. Some participants failed to circle either of the names in some discourses, in many cases circling either the pronoun or verb instead. It is not clear whether these responses reflect a failure to fully understand the task, an attempt to indicate ambiguity, or some other purpose, and so we have omitted them from analysis.

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Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the support of the following grants: NIH NRSA2T32DC00041-06, NIH DC00494, NIH DC02984, and NIHDC DC02502-01A1. We would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of David Swinney, who graciously made his laboratory facilities available for the running of these experiments, and who freely gave of his time and expertise throughout the project. Despite these contributions, Dave selflessly declined to be included as an author on this paper, a living reminder of his generous nature as a colleague and his dedication to scientific endeavor. He is sorely missed. We thank Maria Polinsky, Svetlana Godjevac, Tracy Love, and Vikki Bouck for their expertise at many stages of the research. We also thank Fernanda Ferreira, Keith Rayner, Jennifer Arnold, Alan Garnham, and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. A copy of the stimuli is available from the first author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program in Linguistics, University of Florida, P.O. Box 115454, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    H. Wind Cowles

  2. Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Dept 0109, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0109, USA

    Matthew Walenski

  3. Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Dept 0108, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0108, USA

    Robert Kluender

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Correspondence to H. Wind Cowles.

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Cowles, H.W., Walenski, M. & Kluender, R. Linguistic and cognitive prominence in anaphor resolution: topic, contrastive focus and pronouns. Topoi 26, 3–18 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-006-9004-6

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