Authors: Adina Camelia Bleotu and Brian Dillon
Contact Email(s): cameliableotu@gmail.com, bwdillon@umass.edu
2 thoughts on “Pronouns attract in number but (much) less so in person. Evidence from Romanian.”
Leave a Comment or Question Below
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Really interesting study! Out of curiosity, have you considered at all how/whether the split between 1st/2nd and 3rd might be related to the relatively common view that only the former are encoded, at least as far as interpretation is concerned, whereas the latter might be generally unmarked (and only pragmatically restricted to non-discourse participants, e.g., via Maximize Presupposition etc.)? I haven’t thought this through, but I guess the idea would be that number is going to matter more (or even exclusively) if there is no interpreted person feature to work with from the start? (I guess this issue could also be brought up for number, where similar considerations have been raised, in which case this may be a non-starter, not sure). Any thoughts?
thanks a lot! Yeah, we were thinking about something along these lines. If we assume that 3rd Person is unmarked, then this would indeed explain the results partly, since we do get some agreement attraction with 3rd person pronoun intervenors. However, it would not explain them fully, since the rate of attraction is still lower than with full DP intervenors. This is why we wanted to also say something about the fact that pronouns have no lexically specified N.
As far as the contrast between 1st/2nd pronouns and 3rd person pronouns is concerned, I think the idea that 1st/2nd pronouns are deictic, whereas 3rd person pronouns are not would account for why 1st/2nd person pronouns are more salient and inhibit person agreement attraction. Interestingly, when the intervenors differed both in number and person, there were almost no agreement attraction errors. So it is as if the presence of person somehow makes speakers less sensitive to number. 🙂