Both thematic role and next-mention biases affect pronoun use in Dutch

DOI

An important question is whether speakers consider listeners’ expectations when choosing whether to use a pronoun. It has been suggested that certain thematic roles are more expected to be mentioned again, and are therefore more likely to be pronominalized. In the present study, we aim to disentangle predictability effects on pronoun use from thematic-role effects. To this end, we conducted two web-based continuation experiments in Dutch, in which the next-mention biases associated with Source-Goal and Agent-Patient verbs were manipulated to create a shift in the bias. Experiment 1 confirmed that the manipulations changed the biases. Experiment 2 showed that while thematic role mainly influenced demonstrative and full pronoun use for non-subjects, next-mention biases played a role in the choice between reduced and full pronouns and between pronouns and full NPs, irrespective of thematic role or grammatical function. Thus, thematic role and predictability seem to affect pronoun use in different ways.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/CYTANW
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/CYTANW
Provenance
Creator Vogels, Jorrig (ORCID: 0000-0001-6698-504X)
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Vogels, Jorrig
Publication Year 2023
Rights CC0 1.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Vogels, Jorrig
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/csv; type/x-r-syntax; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; text/markdown; text/comma-separated-values
Size 664567; 25684; 14496; 13638; 34868; 73570; 321065; 1330; 1026; 232190; 40935; 53758
Version 1.0
Discipline Humanities