Personal Pronouns and D-Pronouns in German: Connecting Comprehension to Production

Abstract

We review recent experiments and corpus data from our ongoing investigation of p(ersonal) and d(emonstrative) pronouns. Contrary to a widespread belief, d-pronouns did not always refer to non-topical antecedents in case of referential ambiguity. More generally, the data that we review show that a complex interplay of factors governs the processing of p-pronouns and d-pronouns. During language comprehension, syntactic function, position, and topichood of the antecedent are all taken into account when interpreting a p- or d-pronoun. Similarly, the choice between p- and d-pronoun during language production is heavily influenced by these three factors. We propose an interpretation and a production rule for d-pronouns, both based on prominence features. For interpretation, the proposed rule simply counts prominence features and assigns the d-pronoun the antecedent that is least prominent. For production, we propose a similar rule for choosing between a p- and d-pronoun for referring to a given antecedent. In contrast to interpretation, the rule for choosing a pronominal form makes use of weighted prominence features and relates prominence to production frequency in an exponential way.