Famous protagonists interfere with discourse topicality during pronoun resolution

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to assess the impact of the wider discourse on pronoun interpretation. We specifically look at German demonstrative pronouns (dieser) in comparison to personal pronouns (er), investigating whether dieser-demonstratives are influenced only by factors in the preceding sentence (specifically, sentence topicality) or whether they are additionally influenced by cues from the wider discourse (i.e., discourse topicality). We found that discourse topicality competes with sentence topicality for prominence, when the two cues are not aligned to one and the same referent. This had an impact on referential interpretation of both personal and demonstrative pronouns, with weakened interpretive biases when sentence and discourse topic did not converge on the same referent (Exp. 3). Our data further indicate that the introduction of a protagonist from a well-known novel blocked the emergence of the discourse topic as a prominence-lending cue for personal pronouns (Exp. 1–2). We propose that reference to the famous protagonist triggers a protagonist layer, which introduces its own set of questions under discussion, which in turn invalidates the discourse topic. Crucially, the demonstrative pronoun dieser does not consider the protagonist layer and only relies on the discourse layer for interpretation.