Doctoral Dissertation Research: Reinterpreting Condition B: An Investigation of Pronominal Reference in Romanian

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

Natural language allows humans to refer to objects in the world, but often the way that language does this is by using seemingly under-informative linguistic devices: pronouns like 'he' or 'she.' Unlike proper names like 'Harry Potter,' pronouns do not have fixed reference, and so they can only be understood relative to a given context. For this reason, they offer a direct window into how the human mind tracks information about people and things in a context. Existing research into how listeners understand pronouns has already yielded substantial insight into how they track information about different entities in a discourse. Research suggests that there is much about this process that is shared across different languages. At the same time, there is evidence that languages do vary in how pronouns refer back to discourse entities. This raises the natural question: how much of our ability to refer using language is rooted in universal features of the mind, perhaps independent of language, and how much of it comes from the specifics of the language that one happens to speak? Answers to these questions inform us of the social and cultural factors that underlie language variation and change. This project investigates this question by looking at Romanian, a Romance language spoken by approximately 30 million people worldwide. Romanian appears to present a counter-example to a supposedly universal constraint on pronominal reference. In particular, in the English sentence 'Harry talked about him,' English speakers cannot naturally interpret 'him' to refer back to 'Harry.' In Romanian, this is not true, making Romanian an apparent counter-example to an otherwise robust cross-linguistic generalization. The present proposal tests hypotheses for why Romanian speakers can interpret pronouns in this apparently exceptional fashion. The researchers will investigate how different features of the context, such as the potential referential ambiguity of a pronoun and its syntactic position, impact the interpretations Romanian speakers assign to pronouns, as well as what types of pronouns Romanian speakers choose in production to refer to different antecedents within a context. The investigators take a psycholinguistic approach to their research questions, using a version of the picture description paradigm to investigate the production of pronouns, and a version of the preferential looking task to investigate comprehension. The proposed studies are the first of their kind on Romanian, and their results will be of interest to both theoretical linguists and psycholinguists interested in how language constrains our ability to refer in context. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.