Eintrag

Titel

Reference determination for demonstrative pronouns

Personen

Peter Bosch, Carla Umbach

Jahr

2007

Typ

Aufsatz

Periodikum

ZAS papers in linguistics
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung

Seiten

39 - 51

Band

48

Schlagwörter

Demonstrativ
Pronomen

Abstract

This paper discusses results from a corpus study of German demonstrative and personal pronouns and from a reading time experiment in which we compared the interpretation options of the two types of pronouns (Bosch et al. 2003, 2007). A careful review of exceptions to a generalisation we had been suggesting in those papers (the Subject Hypothesis: "Personal pronouns prefer subject antecedents and demonstratives prefer non-subject antecedents") shows that, although this generalisation correctly describes a tendency in the data, it is quite wrong in claiming that the grammatical role of antecedents is the relevant parameter. In the current paper we argue that the generalisation should be formulated in terms of in-formation-structural properties of referents rather than in terms of the grammati-cal role of antecedent expressions.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/33887