The effect of gender agreement mismatches on intersentential anaphoric pronouns

Abstract

This article focuses on the effect of gender agreement mismatches between personal pronouns and their antecedents across sentences. In two acceptability experiments, we test whether acceptability of gender agreement violations on animated nouns may be modulated by grammatical and contextual features of the antecedents of personal pronouns. In the first experiment, we manipulated the “specificity” feature of the antecedent in order to make the antecedent refer either to the class of individuals or to a specific referent. In the second experiment, we used stereotypically male or female proper names to test whether grammatical gender mismatches between personal pronouns and bigender nouns could be attenuated. Although the first experiment showed an effect explainable purely by grammatical factors, against many theories of “semantic” agreement, the results of the second experiment suggest that both the grammatical and the contextual features of the antecedent are computed when speakers evaluate agreement relations between personal pronouns and their antecedents.