Clausal backgrounding and pronominal reference: A functionalist approach to c-command

Abstract

English speakers' intuitions are strong that pronouns as sentence subjects may not precede their referents (" She spoke after Susan …"). However, a pronoun in a subordinate clause may precede its referent (''After she spoke, Susan …"). According to Government and Binding Theory, these intuitions are subsumed by the principle of c-command, a phrase structure descriptor whose success at describing diverse grammatical phenomena has been widely interpreted as support for the autonomy of syntax hypothesis. We investigate an alternative view, that syntax signals (inter alia) foregrounding/backgrounding structure. Listeners may consult this foregrounding/backgrounding information when inferring pronominal coreference. We backgrounded the main clause using progressive or pluperfect aspect, as in "She had been speaking for several hours when Susan …" A rating study showed coreference was allowed more frequently for pronouns in main clauses when those clauses contained progressive or pluperfect aspect. A follow-up study showed that the constructional semantics of when subordinates contributes to backgrounding interpretations, as does semantic plausibility. Our experiments do not falsify c-command, but rather empirically develop the long-standing view that generalisations about syntactic structures (i.e. formal principles) can be motivated by correlations between form and function.

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