No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Indirect pronominal anaphora have long been a controversial issue in linguistic research. Cornish et al. (2005) contributed to the debate on the ability of pronouns to refer to implicit referents 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 research documented in the present paper is based on the predictions and results of Cornish et al. (2005). Since the experiment using English language material replicated the results of the experiment using French language material, it can be suggested that reference centrality was conceptual and not purely linguistic in nature. Supposing that reference centrality applies to German, too, I tested the following hypothesis with the help of online-questionnaires using dialogues: A non-subject pronoun can felicitously retrieve an implicit referent without native speaker grammaticality judgments turning out negative -but only on the condition that it is "nuclear" and not "peripheral" in terms of the situation which is evoked. The present work also aims at presenting grammaticality judgments as insightful sources of information in linguistic theory.

No abstract