Demonstratives as bundlers of conceptual structure

Abstract

Pronoun resolution has long been central to psycholinguistics, but research has mostly focused on personal pronouns (“he”/“she”). However, much of linguistic reference is to events and objects, in English often using demonstrative pronouns, like “that”, and the non-personal pronoun “it”, respectively. Very little is known about potential form-specific preferences of non-personal and demonstrative pronouns and the cognitive mechanisms involved in reference using demonstratives. We present a novel analysis arguing that the bare demonstrative “that” serves a different function by bundling, and making linguistically accessible, complex conceptual structures, while the non-personal pronoun “it” has a form-specific preference to refer to noun phrases mentioned in the previous discourse. In two English self-paced reading studies, each replicated once with slight variations, we show that readers are reading the demonstrative slower throughout, independently of frequency or complexity of the referent, as a reflection of differences in processing demonstratives vs. pronouns. These findings contribute to two distinct but connected research areas: First, they are compatible with an emergent experimental literature showing that pronominal reference to events is preferably done with demonstratives. Second, our model of demonstratives as conceptual bundlers provides a unified framework for future research on demonstratives as operators on the interface between language and broader cognition.

Event and Entity Coreference Across Five Languages: Effects of Context and Referring Expression

“…Likewise, in our previous study (Loáiciga et al, 2018) we find a preference for it to refer to entities and of this to refer to events. Similar results were also found by Wittenberg et al (2021) looking at it versus that, with the demonstrative being preferred for event coreference: this is interpreted as a "conceptual bundling" action of that, which would make event antecedents accessible by wrapping their complex structure in a simpler referring expression.…”

The co-evolution of pragmatics and grammatical complexity

“…nouns) that trigger agreement, and without there 3 We note that the centrality of syntax to sentence understanding has increasingly become a matter of debate (Culicover & Jackendoff, 2006). In fact, a growing literature in the psycholinguistic and computational domains attempts to 'explain away' the contribution of syntax to parsing in the comprehension process, by appeal either to semantics (Van Lancker, 2001), prosodic effects (Fodor, 2002;Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999;Speer et al, 1996), pragmatic inferences (Levshina, 2021;Mahowald et al, 2022;Steedman & Altmann, 1989;Steels & Casademont, 2015;Wit & Gillette, 1999), or complexity in the parsing process itself (Chaves & Putnam, 2020;Liu et al, 2022). These empirical approaches capture the intuition, with which we concur, that many utterances can be understood on the basis of cues such as animacy, word order, or world knowledge, rather than syntax proper -that is, using the direct phonology-to-semantics mapping.…”