engleski

Crosslinguistic differences in pronoun resolution: Evidence from Croatian and Chinese

The resolution of third-person pronouns has attracted substantial interest in psycholinguistics in recent decades. The most influential claim is that pronoun resolution is guided by the saliency of syntactic roles. In pro- drop languages such as Italian and Croatian, the null pronoun often refers to the most salient subject antecedent, and the overt pronoun to the less salient object antecedent (Carminati, 2002 ; Kraš, 2008). In other pro-drop languages such as Chinese, however, both overt pronouns and null pronouns refer to the subject (Li, Mak, & Sanders, 2016). Moreover, pronoun resolution might be subject to the influence of implicit causality (IC) bias (Fedele & Kaiser, 2015). For a sentence with an IC verb (e.g., John angered/praised Peter because...), the semantic bias of the verb indicates which referent (NP1 or NP2) is likely to be the cause and therefore is the preferred agent of the second clause. The aim of this study is to investigate how implicit causality interacts with pronoun-type bias in two typologically distant pro- drop languages, Croatian and Chinese. We hypothesised that null pronouns are more acceptable in NP1-biased sentences than in NP2- biased sentences in Croatian, whereas overt pronouns will be more acceptable in NP2-biased sentences. In contrast, both null pronouns and overt pronouns should be better accepted in NP1- biased sentences in Chinese. The participants were adult monolingual speakers of Croatian (n=76) and Chinese (n=67). They completed an acceptability judgement task in an online questionnaire. Twenty sentences in 4 conditions were constructed with a similar structure in both languages. We manipulated the direction of the verb bias (IC-NP1 vs IC-NP2) and the pronoun type (null vs overt). The strength of the verb bias was held constant, with minimum bias values of 70%. Participants were instructed to rate the naturalness of the sentences on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 6 (completely acceptable). Data was analysed using mixed-effect linear regression models. Results show that null pronouns are in general more acceptable than overt pronouns in Croatian, while the opposite was observed in Chinese. The effect of verb bias was similar, however: for overt pronoun sentences in both languages, NP2-biased sentences were more acceptable than NP1 ones. Unexpectedly, for sentences with null pronouns, NP1 and NP2 sentences were of the same acceptability. There is a cross-linguistic difference between Croatian and Chinese in pronoun-type bias. Croatian is more dependent on syntactic features, with the null pronoun sentences being more natural to native speakers. Chinese pro-drop has been considered more discourse-dependent, and thus, sentences with null pronouns are in general less acceptable than those with overt pronouns. For null pronoun sentences, the implicit causality verb bias is strong enough to overwrite the null pronoun bias. For sentences with overt pronouns, the verb bias does not play a similar role. We will discuss the implications of these results for future online processing experiments.

pronoun resolution ; implicit causality ; pro-drop languages ; Croatian ; Chinese

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