In this paper, we investigate the acoustic prosodic marking of demonstrative and personal pronouns in taskoriented dialog. Although it has been hypothesized that acoustic marking affects pronoun resolution, we find that the prosodic information extracted from the data is not sufficient to predict antecedent type reliably. Interspeaker variation accounts for much of the prosodic variation that w...

In this paper, I propose that Croatian relative clauses (RCs) introduced by the complementizer što ‘what/that’ do not form a homogeneous class with respect to their derivation: some are derived by movement, and some are derived by a non-movement strategy. Unless the relativized element is the subject, što-RCs normally require a resumptive pronoun to appear in the site of relativization. However...

We describe a pronoun interpretation experiment in which a Coherence Hypothesis is tested against preference-based analyses of pronoun interpretation, including the Parallel Function Preference and the Subject Preference. We demonstrate that preferences can be systematically disrupted through the manipulation of coherence, and that only the Coherence Hypothesis can predict the full range of cor...

Speakers need to use a variety of referring expressions (REs) (e.g. full noun phrases, pronouns or null forms) in pragmatically appropriate ways to produce coherent narratives. Languages, however, differ from each other in terms of a) whether REs as arguments can be dropped or not and b) whether personal pronouns encode gender or not. Here we examine two languages that differ from each other in...