Null vs. overt pronouns and the Topic-Focus articulation in Spanish: 2704

Abstract

Carminati (2002) shows that the existence of both phonetically full and phonetically null pronouns (pro) in Italian reflects a division of labor with respect to anaphora resolution. Pro prefers to link to prominent antecedents more than its phonetically overt counterpart does (where prominence is determined by syntactic position in intrasentential anaphora cases). We first report the results of three written questionnaire studies showing that the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH) of Carminati (2002) correctly predicts the anaphoric behavior of Spanish pronouns both in intraand intersentential anaphora cases. In two-sentence discourses where two potential antecedents (one in preverbal subject position and another in object position) exist, pro is linked 73.2% of the time to the subject (which is syntactically more prominent than the object) whereas the phonetically overt pronoun links to the subject only 50.2% of the time. When there is only a subject antecedent available, sentences containing pro are rated as more natural than sentences containing an overt pronoun, thus suggesting that the anaphoric preference is not simply due to ambiguity of antecedent resolution. Essentially the same contrast obtains in cases of variable binding, where pro links to the subject 86.9% of the time and the pronoun only 63.3% of the time. Two written questionnaire studies corroborate that the topic-focus articulation of the sentence containing a pronoun affects the general anaphoric preferences predicted by the PAH. We report evidence confirming that, in Spanish, preverbal subjects are interpreted as sentential topics. Then we show that when phonetically overt pronouns are preverbal subjects they tend to pick up prominent (subject) antecedents, thus overriding the general preferences encoded in the PAH. This fact suggests that the preferences encoded in the PAH come about as a result of the interpretation associated with the syntactic position that pronouns occupy .

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