Ambiguity avoidance in reflexive dependencies: Evidence from Romanian

Abstract

The choice of a referring expression targeting a previously introduced discourse referent is affected by its potential ambiguity in a given context (Fukumura et al., 2013; Hwang, 2020): speakers use fewer pronouns in contexts where they would be ambiguous. In this work we investigate whether this effect extends to reflexive pronouns, whose distribution is typically governed by strict syntactic constraints, i.e. the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981; Büring, 2005). To ask this question, we turn to Romanian. Unlike English, the regular Romanian pronouns ea/el ‘her/him’ can corefer with a local referential antecedent (Luna talked about her), and be bound by local quantificational antecedents (Every girl talked about her). However, Romanian also has unambiguous reflexive expressions that may also be used in these contexts. We report two production experiments in Romanian investigating the effect of contextual ambiguity on the choice of referring expression for reflexive dependences with both referential (Experiment 1, e.g. Luna) as well as quantificational antecedents (Experiment 2, e.g. every girl), using a variant of the gender match paradigm used in previous work (Arnold, 2010). We find that, in unambiguous contexts, regular pronouns were the preferred form for reflexive and non reflexive dependencies in both experiments. However, whenever a regular pronoun would be formally ambiguous, speakers chose them less often, preferring instead unambiguous reflexive pronouns. Our results show: (1) like reference to non-local antecedents (Ariel, 1990, 2001; Arnold, 2010), intrasentential reference is also sensitive to discourse considerations, and (2) that potential discourse ambiguity impacts the choice of a referring expression irrespective of whether the dependency is achieved syntactically, i.e. bound variable dependencies, or via discourse computations, i.e. (local) coreference.