The Interpretation of Plural Pronouns in Discourse: The Case of They

The Interpretation of Plural Pronouns in Discourse: The Case of They∗ Francesco-Alessio Ursini Centre for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University francescoalessio.ursini@mq.edu.au Nobuaki Akagi Centre for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University nobuakagi@mq.edu.au Abstract This paper presents an experimental study on the interpretation of plural pronoun they in dis- course, and offers an answer to two questions. The first question is whether the anaphoric in- terpretation of they corresponds to that of its antecedent NP(maximal interpretation), or by the “whole” previous sentence (reference in- terpretation). The second question is whether speakers may access only one interpretation or both, although at different “moments” in dis- course. The answers to these questions sug- gest that an accurate logical and psychologi- cal model of anaphora resolution includes two principles. A first principle finds a “default” interpretation, a second principle determines when the “alternative” interpretation can (and must) be accessed. 1 Introduction There is a general consensus that plural pronouns denote plural referents1. However, there is little agreement on their anaphoric potential: how plural pronouns are interpreted against previous discourse. The following examples illustrate the nature of this debate: ∗We would like to thank the participants of these experi- ments for their involvement. We would also like two thank three anonymous reviewers for suggestions and comments, which we think helped in improving the paper. The second author would like to thank his Princess for the constant support and encouragement. 1We follow the dynamic semantics literature and label “ref- erents” the singular and plural individuals denoted by Noun Phrases (NPs) (Kartunnen, 1976; Heim, 1982; Kamp, 1981; Kamp and Reyle, 1993). (1) Some boys are having dinner. They are eat- ing a pizza (2) The boys are having dinner. They are eating a pizza In (1), the indefinite NP some boys denotes an un- specified amount of unidentified boys who are hav- ing dinner. If we have Mario, Luigi and John as boys in the context, then some boys may denote Mario and Luigi as a pair, but not John. In (2), the definite NP the boys denotes the “full” group of boys who are having dinner: Mario, John and Luigi. In both cases, NP and determiner combine to denote a refer- ent which includes more “basic” discourse referents as its parts. The crux of the debate lies on how speakers in- terpret they in these examples. Some approaches as- sume that only the antecedent NP matters; others, that the rest of a sentence also contributes to this in- terpretation. A third group assumes that both options are available, but determined by Grammar. Few ex- perimental works offer evidence in favor of one of these approaches. Studies on singular pronouns in intra-sentential contexts abound in the literature on Language Acquisition and Processing (Lukyanenko et al., 2008; Elbourne, 2005b; Koornereef, 2008), and in the NLP literature (Branco, 2005). However, few or no works attempt to study plural pronouns such as they, especially in inter-sentential contexts. The main goal of this paper is to offer experi- …

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