Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 32, UtrechtEdited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 11–24
Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 11–24
Chapter 1Processing clitic pronouns outside coargumenthood
Online adult processing of English pronouns is subject to early structural constraints. However, if a sentence fails to provide a licit antecedent for a pronoun, ungrammatical antecedents may be fleetingly considered, causing processing disruption. This paper investigates whether illicit antecedents exert any interference in the processing of clitic pronouns. Given an established asymmetry between simple and Exceptional Case Marking predicates in the acquisition of binding Principle B (Baauw & Cuetos 2003), this study asks whether the notion of coargumenthood plays a role during the online processing of clitic pronouns by Italian-speaking adults. I report experimental evidence from a self-paced reading study suggesting that the time course of pronoun resolution is affected by coargumenthood. In Exceptional Case Marking predicates, comprehenders appear to temporarily consider a feature-matching local antecedent as soon as the clitic trace is processed in its thematic position.
Keywords: sentence processing, anaphor resolution, Italian clitics, binding, principle B, exceptional case marking, clitic climbing, coargumenthood
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Clitics and Principle B: Acquisition evidence and linguistic theory
- 3.Forward anaphora and locality effects in adult processing
- 4.Research questions and hypotheses
- 5.The experiment
- 5.1Materials
- 5.2Subjects and procedure
- 6.Results
- 7.Discussion
- 8.Conclusions
-
Note -
References
References (23)
Baauw, Sergio & Fernando Cuetos
2003 The interpretation of pronouns in Spanish language acquisition and breakdown: Evidence for the “Principle B Delay” as a non-unitary phenomenon. Language Acquisition 11(4). 219–275. 
Baauw, Sergio, Maria A. Escobar & William Philip
1997 A delay of Principle B effect in Spanish speaking children: The role of lexical feature acquisition. Proceedings of the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference, GALA 97. 16–21.
Badecker, William & Kathleen Straub
2002 The processing role of structural constraints on the interpretation of pronouns and anaphors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 28(4). 748–769.
Brunetto, Valentina
2015 The pronoun interpretation problem in Romance complex Predicates. Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics 161. 82–100.
Chien, Yu-Chin & Ken Wexler
1990 Children’s knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1(3). 225–295.
Chow, Wing-Yee, Shewaun Lewis & Colin Phillips
2014 Immediate sensitivity to structural constraints in pronoun resolution. Frontiers in Psychology 5. 630.
Clifton, Charles, Shelia Kennison & Jason E. Albrecht
1997 Reading the words her, his, him: Implications for parsing principles based on frequency and on structure. Journal of Memory and Language 36(2). 276–292.
Cunnings, Ian & Patrick Sturt
2014 Coargumenthood and the processing of reflexives. Journal of Memory and Language 75. 117–139.
Dillon, Brian, Alan Mishler, Shayne Sloggett & Colin Phillips
2013 Contrasting intrusion profiles for agreement and anaphora: Experimental and modeling evidence. Journal of Memory and Language 69(2). 85–103.
Grodzinsky, Yosef & Tanya Reinhart
1993 The innateness of binding and coreference. Linguistic Inquiry 24(1). 69–101.
Just, Marcel A., Patricia A. Carpenter & Jacqueline D. Wooley
1982 Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 111. 228–238.
Kennison, Shelia
2003 Comprehending the pronouns her, him, and his: Implications for theories of referential processing. Journal of Memory and Language 49(3). 335–352.
Kush, Dave, Jeffrey Lidz & Colin Phillips
2017 Looking forwards and backwards: The real-time processing of strong and weak crossover. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1). 70.
McKee, Cecile
1992 A comparison of pronouns and anaphors in Italian and English acquisition. Language Acquisition 2(1). 21–54.
Philip, William & Peter Coopmans
1996 The double Dutch delay of Principle B effect. Proceedings of the 20th Boston University conference on language development, BUCLD 20, 576–587. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Phillips, Colin & Lara Ehrenhofer
2015 The role of language processing in language acquisition. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 5(4). 409–453.
Phillips, Colin, Matthew W. Wagers & Ellen F. Lau
2011 Grammatical illusions and selective fallibility in real-time language comprehension. In Jeffrey Runner (ed.), Experiments at the interfaces, Syntax and Semantics, Volume 37, 147–180. Bingley: Emerald Publications.
Reinhart, Tanya
2006 Interface strategies: Optimal and costly computations, Volume 45. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reinhart, Tanya, & Eric Reuland
1993 Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24(4). 657–720.
Reuland, Eric J.
2017 Why is reflexivity so special? Understanding the world of reflexives. Studia Linguistica 71(1/2). 12–59.
Runner, Jeffrey T., Rachel S. Sussman & Michael K. Tanenhaus
2003 Assignment of reference to reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrases: Evidence from eye movements. Cognition 89(1). B1–B13.
Snedeker, Jesse
2013 Children’s sentence processing. In Roger van Gompel (ed.), Sentence processing, 201–232. New York: Psychology Press.
Sturt, Patrick
2003 The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 48(3). 542–562.