Indirect pronominal anaphora have long been a controversial issue in linguistic research (s. Postal 1969, Ward et al. 1991, Schwarz 2000, Erkü & Gundel 1987, Sanford et al. 1983, Yule 1982, Greene et al. 1994. The possibility of using pronouns as indirect anaphors or the conditions under which this could possibly be done, have not satisfactorily been clarified for a long time (general fundamental question=GFQ). Cornish et al. (2005) contributed to the debate in carrying out two reading-time experiments in French and English with the help of which the following general hypothesis was supposed to be tested: A non-subject pronoun can felicitously retrieve an implicit referent without increasing processing cost on the condition that it is "nuclear" in terms of the situation which is evoked. The results of the experiment confirmed their hypothesis. The aim of the present paper is first to identify the reasons why the GFQ has not been satisfactorily answered for a long time and second, to present the work of Cornish et al. (2005) in detail, since it provides useful insights into the use of indirect pronominal anaphora and thus also contributes to answering the GFQ.
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