Testing the neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora: The influence of consistency constraints on interpretations of coreference in Spanish

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Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 901-941 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma

Testing the neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora: The influence of consistency constraints on interpretations of coreference in Spanish* Sarah E. Blackwell* Department of Romance Languages, Gilbert Hall, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA

Received 10 October 1999; revised version 2 August 2000 Abstract This article examines the second half of a set of data from a study carried out to seek evidence of the neo-Gricean pragmatic principles proposed by Levinson (1987a,b, 1991) to account for the interpretation of NP anaphora. Whereas Blackwell (2000) addresses native speakers’ interpretations of Spanish non-clitic reflexives versus pronouns when used in the same linguistic environment, the data analyzed in this article involves the interpretation of Spanish null subjects, pronouns, and lexical NPs. The objective of this portion of the study is to determine whether Levinson’s predictions of coreference and non-coreference, which, Levinson argues, arise from the interaction of neo-Gricean principles, are supported by hearers’ interpretations of coreference in Spanish utterances. An oral comprehension test for the interpretation of anaphoric NPs in Spanish utterances was devised and administered to 105 native speakers in northeastern Spain. The results reveal that, although evidence of several of Levinson’s neo-Gricean sub-maxims is reflected in the data, his prediction of non-coreference from the use of a marked NP is often canceled by semantic and pragmatic ‘consistency constraints’ on coreference, as suggested by Huang ( 199 1, 1994). The listeners’ interpretations of coreference can be attributed primarily to inferences arising from the influence of one or more consistency constraints on coreference, as opposed to inferences based on the use of a marked lexical NP instead of an unmarked, minimal form. The central role that consistency

* I would like to thank Jacob Mey and three anonymous Journal of Pragmatics referees for their invaluable help and insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to express my greatest indebtedness to Dr. Susan Berk-Seligson for her guidance in designing the methodology used in the study reported in this article and in Blackwell (2000), and also my sincere thanks to Yan Huang, whose insightful research has inspired my own. Finally, I would like thank my family and friends from Malejti (Zaragoza), Spain for their constant support and help in carrying out this study. * Phone: +l 706 353 8732; Fax: +l 706 542 3287; E-mail: [email protected] 037%2166/01/$ - see front matter 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: SO378-2166(00)00042-4

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constraints play in the interpretation of anaphora supports their inclusion in the neo-Gricean theory of anaphora. 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords:

Anaphora; Coreference; Pragmatics; anaphors; Gricean theory; Consistency constraints

Interpretation;

Spanish pronouns;

Zero

1. Introduction The problem of how meaning is assigned to various types of referring expressions has been a central issue in the study of utterance interpretation (Matsui, 1998), and it is also one of the main questions posed in anaphora studies. As Fretheim and Gunde1 (1996: 7) point out, part of the problem stems from the fact that a given referring expression constrains possible interpretations, but “rarely (if ever) uniquely determines a single interpretation”. From a classical Gricean standpoint, reference interpretation, including the interpretation of anaphoric expressions, may be viewed as a process in which speakers produce utterances that are sufficiently informative and clear for their addressees, yet economical and not unduly verbose. Addressees should then be able to work out for themselves what the intended interpretation is, based on the referring expression used, the context of use, and their own knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions. However, any theory proposed to deal with reference interpretation should also explain how listeners determine what is meant by what is said when more than one interpretation is possible. This article examines a portion of the data from an experiment’ that was carried out to seek empirical evidence of the operation of two neo-Gricean principles proposed by Levinson (1987a,b) to account for ‘patterns of preferred interpretations’ for zeros, pronouns, and lexical NPs. In addition, it investigates the effects of a set of pragmatic and semantic factors proposed by Huang (1991, 1994) as ‘consistency constraints’ on listeners’ interpretations of coreference. More specifically, the questions addressed in this study include how native speakers of Spanish interpret anaphoric zeros, pronouns, and NPs in Spanish utterances, what inferences they must make in doing so, and the extent to which certain pragmatic and semantic consistency constraints intervene in the interpretation process. As in Blackwell (2000), it was hypothesized that, wherever anaphora relations are not grammatically stipulated (that is, wherever they are not obligatory due to syntactic binding), the consistency constraints, along with grammatical constraints on coreference (e.g. agreement, ccommand, and distributional constraints), will intervene to either promote or ‘override’ Levinson’s neo-Gricean predictions of coreference and non-coreference. The rest of this article is organized as follows. First, in Section 2 Levinson’s neoGricean pragmatic approach to anaphora is summarized. In Section 3 I address some problems and contradictions that arise from Levinson’s predictions of coreference versus non-coreference. Section 4 describes Huang’s alternative neo-Gricean

’ The first half of the data from this study is analyzed in Blackwell (2000).

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proposal, which argues for placing limits, or consistency constraints, on Levinson’s neo-Gricean framework of implicatures. In Section 5, I describe an experiment I carried out in northeastern Spain, in which 105 Spaniards were administered a multiplechoice test for interpretations of anaphoric expressions in Spanish utterances. The responses to the items on the test dealing with the interpretation of Spanish null subjects, pronouns, and lexical NPs are analyzed and interpreted in light of the neoGricean pragmatic model adopted for this study. Finally, in Section 6 I summarize the findings from the data set analyzed and the conclusions reached from these findings.

2. Levinson’s neo-Gricean approach to anaphora Levinson (1987a,b, 1991) proposes a set of neo-Gricean speaker and hearer strategies for preferred interpretations of different NP types. These strategies are formulated as three pragmatic principles, which Levinson refers to as the ‘Q(uantity)‘, ‘I(nformativeness)‘, and ‘M(anner) principles’.2 They are based on Grice’s (1975) original Quantity and Manner maxims, as well as alternative revised-Gricean principles advanced by Atlas and Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984). However, unlike Horn’s proposal, which fails to distinguish between semantic minimization (i.e., semantically general expressions are preferred over semantically specific ones) and surface form, or ‘expression’ minimization’ (shorter expressions are preferred to longer ones), Levinson argues for a separation between the principles that govern an utterance’s surface form and those regulating its informational content. Levinson maintains that the principles he proposes may be used to account for preferred coreferential and disjoint readings in both sentences and discourse (1987b). The Q(uantity)-principle instructs the speaker to make the informationally strongest statement s/he can, while the addressee is to assume that the speaker has done so. According to Levinson (1987b), this principle may be used to account for the interpretation of pronouns in contexts where the syntax permits the direct encoding of coreference from the use of reflexives. Thus, wherever a reflexive could be used to entail coreference, use of a non-reflexive pronoun (the informationally weaker form in the set) is predicted to Q-implicate non-coreference. Blackwell (2000) deals specifically with these predictions with regard to the interpretation of Spanish non-clitic reflexives versus pronouns when used in the same linguistic context in Spanish utterances. There it was shown that Levinson’s Q-based predictions of coreference and non-coreference could be ‘canceled’ or overridden when they were not in keeping with semantic and pragmatic ‘consistency constraints’ on coreference (Huang 1991, 1994). This article, however, focuses on Levinson’s I- and Mprinciples and his predictions of coreference and non-coreference, which, Levinson maintains, result from the interaction of these two principles. Levinson’s I-principle states:

z Levinson’s neo-Gricean Q-, I-, and M-principles are presented and discussed Levinson (1987a,b), and also in Huang (1991, 1994) and Blackwell (2000).

in greater

detail

in

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(1) The I(nformativeness)-Principle Speaker’s Maxim: the Maxim of Minimization Say as little as necessary, i.e., produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends (bearing the Q-principle in mind). Recipient’s Corollary: the Enrichment Rule Amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance by finding the most SPECIFIC interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speaker’s mintended point. Specifically : (a) Assume that stereotypical relations obtain between referents or events, UNLESS (i) this is inconsistent with what is taken for granted, (ii) the speaker has broken the Maxim of Minimization by choosing a prolix expression. (b) Assume the existence or actuality of what a sentence is ‘about’ if that is consistent with what is taken for granted. (c) Avoid interpretations that multiply entities referred to (assume referential parsimony); specifically, prefer coreferential readings of reduced NPs (pronouns or zeros). According to Levinson, when applied to questions of anaphor resolution, this principle translates into a preference for “the maximally rich interpretation of minimal, informationally reduced forms” (Levinson, 1987b: 402). Where anaphora interpretations are concerned, the addressee is instructed to prefer coreferential readings to disjoint ones. Also, because coreferential interpretations tend to reduce the number of entities referred to in an utterance while providing a more informative statement, such interpretations may be accounted for by the I-principle. According to Huang (1991: 306) Levinson’s M(anner)-principle goes as follows: (2) Manner-principle Speaker’s Maxim Do not use a prolix, obscure or marked expression without reason. Recipient’s Corollary If the speaker used a prolix or marked expression M, he did not mean the same as he would have had he used the unmarked expression U - specifically he was trying to avoid the stereotypical associations and I-implicatures of U. Where anaphoric versus non-anaphoric readings are concerned, Levinson predicts that if the speaker uses a marked expression such as a full lexical NP in place of a more minimal and usual unmarked alternative such as a pronoun or zero, the speaker will M-implicate a non-coreferential interpretation with the last ‘relevant’ NP. This pattern is illustrated by the following example from Levinson (1987b: 384):

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(3) John came in and 0 sat down. The man coughed. To summarize the basic pattern of anaphoric reference he proposes, Levinson sets up the following scale (1987b: 384, 410): (4) Lexical NP > Pronoun > Zero Levinson (1987b: 410) explains that where lexical NPs, pronouns, and zeros are concerned, “a choice to the right will tend to implicate co-reference with another NP in the discourse in all loci where a reflexive could not have been used, while a contrastive choice to the left will tend to implicate a disjoint reading from another NF’ in the discourse that may otherwise be a possible antecedent.”

According to Levinson, this pattern is an ‘instantiation’ of his neo-Gricean principles. In summary, Levinson proposes that the three neo-Gricean pragmatic principles interact to generate implicatures of coreference and non-coreference such that, (1) when a pronoun is used where a reflexive could have been used to grammatically encode coreference, a Q-implicature of non-coreference is generated; however, (2) when a minimally informative expression (e.g. a pronoun or zero) is used in an environment where a reflexive could not have occurred, coreference is the ‘I-implicated’ preferred interpretation; but, (3) use of a marked form, such as a pronoun where an unmarked zero could have been used coreferentially, or a full NP where a more minimal pronoun could have been used coreferentially, will tend to implicate non-coreference. Huang (1994: 130) explains the notion of ‘preferred interpretation’ as “the interpretation that is the most favored one out of a number of other, possible interpretations”. He goes on to explain that this is the interpretation that “arises without any particular context or specific scenario being necessary”. In other words, the pattern Levinson proposes is the preferred pattern of anaphora interpretation arising in an unmarked context as opposed to a specific or ‘marked’ one. In essence, Levinson’s ‘preferred’ pattern of anaphora interpretation is that which is inferred in the absence of any information (contextual, semantic, pragmatic), which could intervene to promote an alternative interpretation.

3. Some unresolved questions raised by the neo-Gricean theory One problem with Levinson’s proposal is that it does not fully explain the process of antecedent selection given the possibility of more than one potential antecedent (Ariel, 1994, 1996). For instance, Ariel(1994) notes that many, if not most anaphoric expressions occur in contexts in which there is more than one potential antecedent compatible with the grammatical specifications of the anaphoric expression, as in the following example (Ariel, 1994: 11, originally from Broadbent, 1973): (5) The feedpipe lubricates the chain, and it should be adjusted to leave a gap half an inch between itself and the sprocket.

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Although Levinson refers to some of the factors involved in picking the intended antecedent (e.g. ‘assume stereotypical relations obtain . . . unless this is inconsistent with what is taken for granted’), Ariel argues that he fails to spell out how one determines which of the NPs in a context is a possible and the most probable antecedent. Ariel (1994, 1996) also criticizes Levinson’s failure to take into consideration the different contexts in which antecedents and anaphoric expressions can occur, the various relations that may hold between them, and the wide variety of anaphoric devices available to speakers (e.g. names, definite descriptions, demonstratives, etc.). As a result, the neo-Gricean features of relative brevity and degree of informativity are insufficient to predict the different distributional patterns of NP types in the determination of interpretations of coreference and non-coreference. For instance, Ariel (1994: 16), who bases her conclusions on empirical data, points out that “many if not most definite descriptions and proper names are interpreted by reference to linguistic antecedents”. The viability of the pattern of anaphora interpretation proposed by Levinson appears to rely on two fundamental assumptions: (1) that minimal forms will be preferred over non-minimal ones when coreference is intended; and (2) that when two different NP types (e.g. a pronoun and zero) can alternate in the same linguistic context, they are in complementary distribution with each other. However, it is a well known fact that different types of referring expressions, including NPs, pronouns, zeros, and reflexives, are not always in complementary distribution, making it possible for several NP types to be used in the same linguistic context to implicate the same coreference relation.3 At the same time, Levinson’s generalization that reversion to a ‘marked’ (prolix, non-minimal, less usual) NP will tend to implicate noncoreference is not always correct, since a full definite NP or a stressed pronoun, where the clitic (unstressed) pronoun le (‘him’) might have been used coreferentially, can also be used to implicate coreference, as in (6), which is an excerpt from a Spanish children’s novel by Elvira Lindo4 (1998: 11, inclusion of the alternates (a e’1/@)in parentheses mine): (6) 1 . . . se me acerco un chavaf y me pregunto por todo el morro: REFL. me came-near a kid and me asked-3sg. by all the mouth 2 - Oyes, nifio, jtd no seras Manolito Gafotas? hear-2sg. boy you not will-be-2sg. Manolito Gafotas

3 For instance, DeMello (1996) reports that it is very common in many regions of both Spain and America for Spanish prepositional (non-clitic) reflexive forms (e.g. si’ or si mismo (‘himself’)) to be replaced by non-reflexive pronouns (e.g. e’l (‘him’)). I address this problem in Blackwell (2000) in light of Levinson’s Q-principle, from which he predicts that a non-reflexive pronoun where a reflexive could have been used, will implicate non-coreference. The data reveal that this prediction is not always born out due to the non-complementarity of the two alternates and the effects of consistency constraints on coreference. 4 Although Lindo is a Spanish author and her book, Manolito on the road (1998) is entirely in Spanish, the original title of this work is in English.

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3 Y yo le dije a ese nirio (a e’l/ @) que si que lo era . . . and I him told to that boy (to him/0) that yes that it was-lsg ‘ . . . a kid came up to me and asked me with every bit of nerve: - Hey, boy, you wouldn’t be Manolito Gafotas, would you? And I told that boy (Z-ZZW him) yes I was . ..’ Here, the obligatory clitic pronoun le (‘him’) the NP ese nifio (‘that boy’) in the third line is used to implicate coreference with the antecedent UIZchaval (‘a kid’). By way of illustration, I have included the anaphoric alternates to e’l (a ‘HIM’) and zero in parentheses, which may be used in place of a ese nifio (‘to that boy’), to express the same coreferential relation. However, according to Bolinger (1979), use of a definite description or demonstrative NP instead of a more minimal pronoun or zero might be viewed as an attempt by the speaker to add information, provide a richer, more interesting description, or to express the speaker’s attitude toward the referent. In other words, use of a certain NP type may do more than simply implicate coreference by carrying out additional semantic and/or pragmatic functions. One must therefore rely not only on the referring expression used, but also on knowledge of the discourse context and background knowledge and assumptions, in order to infer whether or not coreference was intended from the use of a particular expression - be it ‘marked’ or ‘unmarked’. Following Levinson’s program, M-implicatures should induce non-coreference in contexts where a lexical subject pronoun is used in place of more minimal, and thus unmarked zero. However, Rigau (1986: 148) observes the non-complementarity of these alternates in Spanish in sentences such as the following, where either the overt pronoun or the null pronoun may be interpreted coreferentially with Pepe (Rigau uses ‘pro’ instead of ‘0’ to indicate null subjects): (7) Pepe dice que {Cl/pro} telefoneara a Marfa. Pepe says that {he/pro} will-telephone to Maria ‘Pepe says he’ll phone Maria’ Spanish, like Italian, has a rich verb morphology, whereby tensed verbs are marked morphologically for person and number, and therefore, these verbs recover the grammatical specifications of the null subject. For example, in (7) the stressed /a/ in telefonearci (‘will telephone’) indicates that the verb is both future and third-person, singular. The default or ‘preferred’ implicature arising from (7), in the absence of information to the contrary, is that both the null pronoun and the subject pronoun e’l (‘he’) refer anaphorically to the subject of the main clause, Pepe. With regard to the interpretation of (7), Rigau maintains that , “if there is a preferred reading, it is due to the discourse context in which the sentence appears, rather than to the presence of a full/empty pronoun. In short, it is due to the discourse grammar” (1986: 148). Examples such as (7) show that Levinson’s model can make the wrong prediction with regard to the use of null versus overt subject pronouns in Spanish. In such instances, we must rely on other factors besides the overt/null contrast to determine

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whether coreference is intended or not, including the discourse context and the knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions that are shared by the speaker and the addressee, that is, their ‘common ground’ (Clark and Marshall, 1981; Clark and Carlson, 1992). There are a number of contexts in which the use of a null subject in place of an overt pronoun does result in a contrast in reference in Spanish. Luj&r (1985, 1986) illustrates the contrastive function of overt versus null pronouns in Spanish in a wide variety of syntactic contexts. Furthermore, she shows that the distinction between stressed and unstressed pronouns in non-pro-drop languages (such as English) functions like the overt/null pronominal distinction in pro-drop languages (such as Spanish), and that they give rise to similar systematic contrasts in anaphoric interpretation. For instance, the overt/null contrast in Spanish produces the same effect that the stressed/unstressed contrast in English does with regard to the parallel-function strategy, which refers to the tendency to match grammatical function in pronounantecedent pairs (Solan, 1983; examples from Lujan, 1986: 255): (8) a. Ana ama a Elsa y {0/ells} lo sabe. (O=Ana; ella=Elsa) Ana loves to Elsa and {0/she} it knows ‘Ana loves Elsa and {she/SHE} knows it.’ (she=Ana; SHE=Elsa} b. Ana ama a Elsa y Eva la odia {0/a ella}. (0=Elsa; ella=Ana) Ana loves to Elsa and Eva her hates {0/to her} ‘Ana loves Elsa and Eva hates (her/HER}. (her=Elsa; HER=Ana) Lujarr concludes that the overt/null and stressed/unstressed forms do not alternate freely; but, she adds, “any instance where they appear to do so can be explained away by reference to context” (1986: 254). The examples in (8) show that use of an overt pronoun in Spanish where a null pronoun could also occur, implicates an alternative interpretation (i.e. a contrast in reference), but not the non-coreferential reading which Levinson’s framework erroneously predicts. The fact that both overt (stressed) pronouns and null (unstressed) pronouns pick out different antecedents crosslinguistically is also attested to by Huang (1994). Huang observes, “what the M-principle does . . . is to suggest often but not invariably a contrast in how local coreference may be: the use of a zero anaphor I-implicates the immediate subject as the antecedent while the use of a pronoun M-implicates the more distant subject as the antecedent” (1994: 135). These findings support the observation that both marked and unmarked alternates can implicate coreference, and in turn, that Levinson’s pragmatic M-implicatures overpredict non-coreference. Furthermore, Huang finds that marked alternates in Chinese can be used in the same context to express the same coreferential interpretation as unmarked forms, but that they can implicate alternative messages that would not have been conveyed by the use of the unmarked form, including contrasts in expectedness or emphaticness. Therefore, while Levinson’s M-principle’s Speaker’s Maxim (‘do not use a prolix, obscure or marked expression without reason’) is still viable, its Recipient’s Corollary would account for the facts more accurately if it were stated as follows, which is in accordance with Huang’s revised neo-Gricean framework (cf. Huang, 1994: 134):

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(9) Revised M-Principle: Recipient’s Corollary The use of a marked (more complex, prolix) form will tend to M-implicate an alternative interpretation, one other than that which would have been implicated stereotypically by the use of an unmarked (more minimal, simpler) altemative.5 This revised version of the M-principle allows us to account for implicatures involving contrasts in interpretation arising from the use one expression in place of another, which may be at the level of reference or only at the semantic/pragmatic level. If we closely examine Levinson’s I-principle, and specifically, its Recipient’s Corollary with its sub-maxims for hearers, we are left wondering exactly how these rules intervene to promote interpretations of coreference. As Levinson (1987a: 69) explains, implicatures arising from the application of the neo-Gricean principles are constrained by the requirement of consistency with what is non-controversial or taken for granted, which means, for instance, “there is no Q-implicature from ‘I cut a finger’ to ‘I cut someone else’s finger’; and no I-implicature of conditional perfection6 from ‘If the door is locked I have a key in my pocket’ to ‘Iff (i.e. if and only if) the door is locked I have a key in my pocket”’ (1987a: 69). In other words, the theory assumes the importance of one’s knowledge of stereotypical relations and knowledge assumed to be taken for granted, or the participants’ state of mutual knowledge, in the process of inferring implicatures of coreference. However, it fails to clearly explain how such knowledge and assumptions relate to the basic pattern of implicatures proposed by Levinson, or how they intervene to disambiguate anaphoric expressions.

4. Huang’s revised neo-Gricean approach: Consistency constraints on implicatures Huang (1991, 1994) develops an alternative approach to that of Levinson within the neo-Gricean framework to deal with Chinese anaphora. It attempts to capture the fact that in languages like Chinese, with the exception of constructions where the antecedent and anaphor are clause-mate core arguments, there is a stronger preference for coreference than for non-coreference. In addition, Huang’s framework assumes that there is a semantic distinction between referentially dependent reflexives on the one hand, and other non-referentially dependent anaphoric expressions on the other. Most importantly, however, Huang argues that pragmatic principles for dealing with anaphora must be constrained by factors such as information saliency s Such a revision is in line with Levinson’s (1991) observation with regard to the ‘neutralization’ of the predicted Q-contrast between use of a reflexive (often the more prolix form in many languages) versus a plain pronoun. More specifically, Levinson (1991: 119-120) points out that, whereas there are contexts in which the same ‘reference’ may be assigned to two alternate forms (e.g. John found a snake near him/himself, the choice of one form versus the other results in semantic/pragmatic contrasts such as differences in ‘point of view’ (Kuno, 1987). h Conditional perfection (Geis and Zwicky, 1971) is cited by Levinson (1987a,b) as one kind of conversational inference that arises from Grice’s Quantity 2 Maxim, when a recipient’s corollary is added to it.

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and general consistency conditions on conversational implicature. He proposes that by using a combination of neo-Gricean conversational implicatures and a set of resolution principles (which he dubs ‘consistency constraints’) to organize their interaction, many of the patterns of preferred interpretations for intrasentential anaphora in Chinese can be explained. For instance, Huang finds that in Chinese, the use of a pronoun where zero can occur does not always M-implicate a contrast in reference with zero. Huang’s explanation for why M-implicatures apply under certain circumstances and vanish under others is based primarily on one of the properties proposed by Grice (1975, 1978) as characterizing all conversational implicatures, namely, cancelability or defeasibility. That is, a conversational implicature can be overridden or canceled by placing an utterance in another linguistic or non-linguistic context where some additional premises are added (Huang, 1991; Levinson, 1983). Thus, in the case of intended coreference,7 Levinson’s pattern of ‘preferred’ interpretations of full NPs pronouns, and zero can be canceled by contextual material. In addition, Huang proposes that conversational implicatures can be canceled when there is an inconsistency with (1) background assumptions (or world knowledge), (2) meaning-nn, (3) semantic entailments, and (4) priority pragmatic inferences. Huang (199 1, 1994) points out that an M-implicated contrast in reference can be canceled when it is not in keeping with background assumptions or world knowledge. Such knowledge includes factual or general encyclopedic knowledge, premises about stereotypical roles, and expectations based on familiar frames, scenes, scripts, or schemata. Furthermore, any potential antecedent will tend to be rejected if it is not in keeping with one’s background assumptions and world knowledge (Huang, 1991, 1994). Huang also proposes that “the M-contrast in reference must be consistent with what the speaker might clearly intend (that is, mean-n@ given the assumed state of mutual knowledge” (1991: 325). The notion of mutual knowledge is defined by Clark and Marshall (1981) in the following manner: “A knows that A and B mutually know that p”; and, from the vantage point of speaker B, B knows that A and B mutually know that p (1981: 18). The background assumptions and world knowledge previously discussed could form a part of the mutual knowledge, or the ‘common ground’8 of the speaker and the addressee.

’ According to Reinhart (1986: 124, citing Chomsky, 1981: 314), the interpretation given to the optional (free) comdexing of a pronoun and an antecedent as in: Maria, quiere a SUS,~ amigos. Mary loves act. 3-pass. friends ‘Mary loves ( herijhis/their/your-non-fam. ] friends’. is that of ‘intended coreference’, i.e., the speaker intends the choice of reference or value for the possessive pronoun sus to be identical to that of Maria. Reinhart suggests that it would be appropriate to label intended coreference ‘the pragmatic interpretation of anaphora’ or ‘pragmatic coreference’. According to Reinhart (1986: 124), “this type of anaphora interpretation defines a relation between linguistic structures and their potential uses for the purpose of expressing referential intentions, rather than defining referential or semantic relations between expressions in the sentence”. * Clark and Marshall (1981) make use of Karttunen and Peters’ (197.5) notion of ‘common ground’, which refers to “the set of propositions ‘any rational participant [in an exchange of talk] is rationally

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According to Huang (199 1, 1994), a third way in which the M-contrast in reference may be canceled is when it is inconsistent with semantic constraints. Specifically, a contrast in reference from the use of a marked form may be overruled by semantic entailments.9 Semantic entailments account for the cancellation of an M-contrast in reference from the use of a marked NP in instances where the meaning of the antecedent semantically entails the meaning of the anaphor. The following example illustrates this relationship: (10) a. Juan hablo con su esposai. La mujerij le dio un beso. ‘Juan spoke with his wifei. {The woman/the wife}ij gave him a kiss.’ b. Juan hablo con la mujer,. SU esposaq/j le dio un beso. ‘Juan spoke with {the woman/the wife}i. His wife,, gave him a kiss.’ Su esposa (‘his wife’) in (10a) can semantically entail la mujer (‘the woman’ or ‘the wife’) and therefore they can be interpreted coreferentially; but, in (lob) the first NP, la mujer, does not entail su esposa, and therefore coreference is not acceptable. In other words, use of marked lexical NP (e.g. la mujer) can implicate coreference when the meaning of the potential antecedent (e.g. su esposa) semantically entails that of the marked expression. Huang also observes that M-contrasts are overridden when there is inconsistency with what is relevant or salient. This consistency constraint of antecedent salience is directly related to the notions of ‘topic”O and ‘aboutness’. In fact, Klein-Andreu notes that ‘aboutness’ is “the essential characteristic of topics” (1989: 77). With regard to anaphora relations, the notion of ‘aboutness’ refers to the intuition that the intended referent for an anaphoric expression must be the most salient object in the domain of discourse at the moment of the utterance, and “the most salient object . . . is the object the discourse is about at the relevant moment” (Bosch, 1983: 203).”

justified in taking for granted, for example, by virtue of what has been said in the conversation up to that point, what all the participants are in a position to perceive as true, whatever else they mutually know, assume, etc’.” (Clark and Marshall, 1981: 20, citing Karttunen and Peters, 1975: 286). 9 Levinson (1983: 174) explains the notion of semantic entailment in the following manner: “A semantically entails B iff every situation which makes A true makes B true (or: in all worlds in which A is true, B is true)“. ‘a The topic of a sentence can be defined briefly as what the sentence is about, i.e., it represents the theme of the sentence, or “what the speaker intends a sentence to be primarily about” (Gundel et al., 1993: 279). According to Reinhart (1983: 198) the ‘topic’ or ‘theme’ of a sentence “is a pragmatic relation which is identifiable only with respect to the context of its utterance”. Nevertheless, sentence-level properties may affect the choice of topic for a given sentence in a given discourse. For example, there is a strong preference in discourse to interpret the grammatical subject as the topic or to place the topic in subject position (Bolinger, 1979). However, Spanish verbs such as gustar (‘like’) cast the experiencer as the grammatical indirect object, which may easily function as a topic, e.g. A Juan le gusta (‘John likes it’). ‘I Various other terms have been used to refer to the relative salience of referents (and thus potential antecedents) including ‘foregrounded status’ (Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983), ‘focus’ (Linde, 1979; Marlsen-Wilson et al., 1982) the cognitive status of ‘in focus’ (Gundel et al., 1993), and the salience of the ‘reference point’ established by the antecedent (Van Hoek, 1995, 1997; Langacker, 1996).

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To illustrate the effects of aboutness on the system of neo-Gricean implicatures, Huang points out that when there is a topic in Chinese, the M-implicated contrast in reference between a pronoun and a zero anaphor tends to vanish, and both linguistic alternates may be interpreted coreferentially with the topic of the sentence. With regard to the neo-Gricean theory of anaphora, Huang proposes that any interpretation implicated by the interaction of the M- and I-principles is constrained by ‘information saliency’ in general, and that “implicatures to coreference may be preferred according to the saliency of antecedent in line with the following hierarchy: topic > subject > object, etc.” (1991: 330). Thus, antecedent salience may be viewed as a graded notion, such that different potential antecedents may have different degrees of prominence in the discourse context, which, Huang maintains, correlates with their grammatical function. According to Huang, in the absence of any other consistency constraints to override the proposed hierarchy, addressees will tend to favor as antecedent topics over subjects, subjects over objects, and objects over any other NPs. However, these preferences will invariably be constrained by the other consistency constraints on implicatures, including, for instance, semantic constraints, as the following examples from Chinese demonstrate (Huang, 1994: 165): (11) a. Xiaoming Xiaoming ‘Xiaoming b. Xiaoming Xiaoming ‘Xiaoming

gebo teng, 0 shui bu zhao jiao. arm ache 0 sleep not sleep has a pain in the arm and (he) cannot fall asleep.’ gebo teng, 0 zhong le qilai. arm ache 0 swell PFV’* up has a pain in the arm and (it) has swollen up.’

Here, the saliency hierarchy for preferred antecedents is overridden by the lexical semantics of the predicate verb zhong (‘swell up’), so that the antecedent of the zero anaphor in (b) is gebo (‘arm’) and not Xiaoming. Huang’s proposal accounts for the fact that, even though a basic pattern of preferred interpretation may be captured in terms of revised Gricean implicatures, this pattern will be restricted by general semantic constraints, antecedent saliency, background assumptions and world knowledge, the interlocutors’ state of mutual knowledge, and semantic entailments. By placing these constraints on the neo-Gricean implicatures, the problem of how addressees are to determine whether potentially anaphoric expressions are to be interpreted as coreferential or disjoint from potential antecedents may be dealt with.

5. Interpretations of zeros, pronouns, and NPs in Spanish utterances The data examined in the following sections were gathered in an experiment in which a multiple-choice comprehension test for interpretations of anaphoric NPs in

I2 PFV stands for ‘perfective aspect marker’ (le) (Huang, 1994: xvii).

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a series of spoken utterances in isolation was administered to 105 native speakers of Spanish. The test items analyzed were designed to determine whether or not contrasts in reference predicted by Levinson from the use of zeros, pronouns, and full lexical NPs could be supported by listeners’ interpretations of these NP types in Spanish utterances. Specifically, given the non-complementarity of null subjects, pronouns, and lexical NPs in Spanish and the possibility of more than one possible antecedent for an anaphoric expression, the following questions were addressed: (1) To what extent are Levinson’s neo-Gricean principles and predictions of coreference/non-coreference supported by the data? (2) Upon hearing an utterance in isolation, how do listeners interpret an anaphoric expression when often there are at least two potential antecedents? (3) What kinds of semantic and pragmatic consistency constraints on implicatures influence the listeners’ interpretations of the anaphoric expressions in question? (4) Under what conditions is Levinson’s prediction of an M-implicature of non-coreference from the use of a marked form overridden? 5.1. Method A total of twenty-three sets of contrasting utterances comprised the listening comprehension test. The results of ten of these sets, which were divised to test the validity of Levinson’s predictions based on the Q-principle, are discussed in Blackwell (2000). The eight sets analyzed in the present article were contrived to seek evidence of Levinson’s I- and M-principles and his predictions regarding the interpretation of zeros, pronouns, and lexical NF’s.I3 The test items involving utterances characterized by backward anaphora are not dealt with here due to limitations on the scope of this article. A tape-recording of the contrasting utterances (CUs) was made in which a female, native speaker of Spanish from Zaragoza, Spain read each utterance out-loud twice in a row, with pauses in between readings. Before the audiotaping of the utterances, the speaker was not given any instructions on how the utterances were to be read or how to interpret them. Furthermore, after the taping session, she was never asked what meanings she intended to convey when reading the utterances out-loud. In retrospect, this study would have benefited from asking the speaker for her interpretations of the utterances, since we might expect her understanding of the anaphoric elements in question to have influenced the way she read the utterances during the tape-recording, particularly with regard to her intonation, stress, phrasing, and pauses.14 The two utterances comprising each of the eight contrasting sets (CSs) in this portion of the study were of roughly the same length and grammatical structure. As in Blackwell (2000), the general hypothesis was that coreferential readings inferred

I3 One set of utterances from the test was discarded because of its length, which may have made it difficult for participants to recall and interpret. I4 This weakness in the methodology was pointed out by an anonymous reader of an earlier version of this paper, who noted that information regarding the speaker’s own interpretations would have strengthened the conclusions.

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from hearing these utterances would need to be in keeping with the consistency constraints of background and mutual knowledge, semantic entailments and general semantic constraints, and antecedent salience or ‘aboutness’. However, more specifically, each utterance contrasted with the other member in its set with respect to the hypothesized influence of at least one consistency constraint on its interpretation. In other words, for each utterance, it was hypothesized that the pragmatic implicature Levinson predicted from the use of a certain NP type would be consistent with a given constraint, and thus the constraint would uphold the prediction, or else the prediction would be inconsistent with the constraint and thus be canceled. Also, most of the utterances were designed in such a manner that one consistency constraint could feasibly promote one interpretation (i.e. the selection of one of the potential antecedents), while the influence of another constraint could possibly support an alternative interpretation. The constraints were manipulated in this way in order to try to determine how they might influence the listeners’ interpretations and the extent to which the hypothesized constraints were responsible for promoting or canceling interpretations of coreference/non-coreference. In the tape-recording, utterances comprising the same CS were read as far apart as possible. Nevertheless, it must be noted that there is no way of knowing whether the order in which the utterances occurred on the tape influenced the listeners’ responses.i5 The 105 participants in this study were native speakers of Spanish from central and northeastern Spain and ranged in age from eighteen to seventy-five. The multiple choice test was administered to groups of four to fifteen subjects at a time, and approximately half of the participants participated in informal follow-up group interviews in which they were asked why they had interpreted the utterances as they had. These interviews were audiotaped, and the participants’ comments were later written down and summarized informally. The results of the multiple-choice test were tabulated in both raw numbers and percentages based on the number of participants who chose each of the four possible answers. The eight sets of utterances along with their respective test questions and results are presented in tables in the following sections; also, the reasons that participants gave in the follow-up interviews for why they interpreted the utterances as they had, are discussed. Finally, it is important to point out that because the utterances were contrived and presented under experimental conditions, certain aspects of the ‘intrinsic context’ did not intervene in this study. Clark and Carlson (1992: 67) explain their notion of ‘intrinsic context’ as follows: “The intrinsic context for a listener trying to understand what a speaker means on a particular occasion is the common ground that the listener believes holds at the moment between the speaker and the listeners he or she is speaking to.”

One possible source of common ground that the speaker and the listeners in this study did not share was their ‘physical copresence’ (Clark and Marshall, 1981; Clark and Carlson, 1992). That is, the listeners and the speaker did not experience the same I5 The fact that the order of the utterances was never tested for variability of response was pointed out by an anonymous reader as a possible weakness in the methodology used in this study.

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physical situation together at the time when the utterances were produced, and therefore, this source of common ground could not be used to draw inferences about speaker meaning, and thus utterance meaning. Another source of common ground that Clark and Carlson discuss is ‘linguistic copresence’, which refers to the linguistic (discourse) context and shared by the speaker and addressee because it has been mentioned in the discourse itself (Clark and Marshall, 1981; Clark and Carlson, 1992). The speaker and the listeners in the experiment did not share this source of common ground because (due to the methodology used) the listeners did not attend to and interpret the utterances produced by the speaker at the time she spoke. However, the source of common ground clearly available to both the speaker and the listeners is what Clark and Carlson label ‘community membership’. This refers to the mutual knowledge assumed to be shared by all of the members of a given community because of their membership in this group (1992: 70). In this study, all of the participants shared community membership in the sense that they were all Spaniards from or with family ties to Malejan, a small Spanish town located approximately 60 kilometers west of Zaragoza, where the experiment was conducted. ‘Thus, community membership mutual knowledge’ was expected to influence the listeners’ coreference interpretations. 5.2. Testing the I-Principle 5.2.1. Results and discussion Four sets of CUs were contrived solely to seek evidence of the I-principle and the effects of the consistency constraints on anaphora interpretations. Few items were constructed for this portion of the study because it was assumed that evidence of the I-principle would also be obtained from the ten sets of utterances constructed to investigate the Q-principle (see Blackwell, 2000). That is, it was hypothesized that whenever the contrast between a reflexive and a pronoun used in the same linguistic context was canceled or leveled, the I-principle would intervene along with the consistency constraints on implicatures to explain an interpretation of coreference from the use of the semantically weaker pronoun. This pattern is observed in Blackwell (2000). CUs (la) and (lb) (Table 1) have two potential antecedents, the subject, mi padre (‘my father’), and the object, Felipe. In both utterances, either of these NPs could serve as the antecedent of the first null subject of the second coordinate, since both null subjects pertain to third-person, singular verbs. For (lb) it was hypothesized that the listeners’ background knowledge about politics in general and Spanish politics in particular would promote coreference between Felipe, the name often used to refer to Felipe Gonzalez, and the null subject of the verb phrase no ha podido mejorar la situacibn econbmica (‘hasn’t been able to improve the economic situation’). This hypothesis was based on the assumption that the Spanish listeners would interpret Felipe as referring to Felipe Gonzalez due to the political context of the utterance itself, including the stereotypically political content of the verb phrase pertaining to the anaphoric null subject, and also because of the listeners’ shared background knowledge as members of the Spanish community, e.g., Felipe Gonzalez was the

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prime minister of Spain at the time of the data collection. In addition, the listeners’ common knowledge of the economic situation in Spain (e.g. high unemployment) might also promote an inference of coreference with Felipe. On the other hand, in the case of (la) the verb phrase containing the anaphoric null subject in question, fulla mucho (‘is wrong a lot/fails a lot’), is more politically ‘neutral’, i.e. anybody can make mistakes - not only the prime minister. Therefore, it was hypothesized that inference to stereotype would play a weaker role in influencing the listeners’ interpretations. Simultaneously, the relatively greater salience of the subject NP of the first coordinate, mi padre (‘my father’) might lead the listeners to choose it as the antecedent. As the test results reveal, Felipe was selected most frequently as the antecedent of the null subject in question for both utterances. For CU (la), 79% of the listeners chose Felipe as the antecedent, in contrast with the 87% who selected the same antecedent for (lb). These results suggest that the verb phrase that was manipulated affected the hearers’ responses, but only slightly. That is, because the verb phrase ‘hasn’t been able to improve the economic situation’ in CU (lb) refers to an activity more commonly associated with political leaders, a greater number of respondents chose Felipe as the antecedent for (lb) than for (la). Furthermore, this interpretation constitutes the inference that was most in keeping with their real world knowledge of the economy in Spain at the time of the experiment. However, because the same antecedent was chosen by a majority of the listeners for both utterances, we must seek some further explanation. Obviously, in the case of (lb), the listeners were able to rely more readily on background assumptions related to a preexisting stereotypical political role than in the case of (la), which depicted a less obvious reason for the father’s not voting for ‘Felipe’, that is, ‘because he is wrong a lot’. However, given the scenario depicted in (la), one can surmise that a speaker is also more likely to criticize a politician than one’s father, which in turn provides a reason for voting for another candidate (‘[Jose Marfa] Aznar’, the current prime minister of Spain). The subjects’ high consensus with regard to their choice of Felipe as the antecedent of both utterances suggests that listeners based their interpretations largely on real-world pragmatic knowledge and inferences based on stereotypical assumptions. In addition, the ‘aboutness’ constraint, which predicts that the most salient NP (typically a subject) is what the discourse is about and thus the most likely antecedent, had a weaker effect on the participants’ interpretations of coreference than was expected for (la), since only 18% of the respondents chose the subject NP, mi padre (‘my father’) as the antecedent upon hearing the utterance. CS (1) also raises the issue of subject and object continuity and the strategy for the interpretation of intrasentential anaphora known as the ‘parallel function strategy’ (Cowan, 1980; Solan, 1983; Luj&r, 1986; and see Section 3 of the present article). This strategy asserts that “a pronoun in the second clause of a compound sentence will be interpreted as being coreferential with the noun phrase in the preceding clause which has the same grammatical function” (Cowan, 1980: 111). Cowan notes, however, that parallel function interpretations are promoted in sentences characterized by coordinate clauses conjoined by and and but, whereas such interpretations are less

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Table 1 CS (1) (Total N = 105)

(la). En las dltimas elecciones mi padre votd a Felipe, pero coma 0 falla mucho, esta vez ha votado a Aznar. in the last elections my father voted act. Felipe, but since pro fails a-lot, this time has voted for Aznar ‘In the last election my father voted for Felipe, but since (he) is wrong a lot, this time (he) has voted for Aznar’.

(la.) ~QuiCn falla mucho? who fails much ‘Who is wrong a lot?’ a. b.

el padre de la persona que habla ‘the father of the person who is speaking’ Aznar ‘ Aznar’

c. Felipe ‘Felipe’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (la)

N

%

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

18 17.14

3 2.86

83 79.05

1 0.95

105 100.00

(lb) En las ultimas elecciones mi padre vot6 a Felipe, pero coma 0 no ha podido mejorar la situacidn ecomjmica, esta vez 0 ha votado a Aznar. in the last elections my father voted act. Felipe, but since pro not has been-able improve-inf. the situation economic, this time pro has voted for Aznar ‘In the last election my father voted act. Felipe, but since (he) hasn’t been able to improve the economic situation, this time (he) has voted for Aznar’.

(lb) LQuiCn no ha podido mejorar la situacidn econ6mica? who not has been-able improve-inf. the situation economic Who hasn’t been able to improve the economic situation? a. Aznar ‘ Aznar’ b. Felipe ‘Felipe’

c. el padre de la persona que habla ‘the father of the person who is speaking’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (lb)

N %

a. 1 0.95

b. 91 86.67

C.

12 11.43

d. 1 0.95

Total 105 lOO.OO

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likely when coreference occurs between a main and a subordinate clause (1980: 119). These observations may help to explain why the potential antecedent, mi padre (‘my father’), which is the subject of the first coordinate in both utterances, was not the ‘preferred’ antecedent of the anaphoric null subject, since in both utterances, the anaphoric zero occurs in subordinate clauses beginning with coma (‘since’). Another factor that may have contributed to the listeners’ choice of antecedent is the use of the conjunction pero (‘but’), which implicates that there is a contrast between the two conjuncts (Levinson, 1983: 127, citing Grice, 1961; Mittwoch, 1983). This conventional implicature may have promoted the interpretation of coreference between Felipe and the null subject in both cases by signaling the need to explain the contrast coming up, i.e., why ‘my father’ (mi padre) did not vote for Felipe ‘this time’ (esta vez). In other words, the lexical item pero, with its conventional implicature indicating a contrast, seems to help promote coreference with the antecedent FeEipe. The participants interviewed in follow-up sessions almost unanimously agreed that the interpretations of the null subjects in CUs (la) and (lb) were obvious based on the fact that everyone knew who ‘Felipe’ and ‘Aznar’ referred to, and were familiar with the political situation in Spain. From this we can conclude that the listeners’ recognition of and familiarity with the political figures mentioned in the utterances, combined with their pragmatic background knowledge and stereotypical assumptions, were the key factors influencing their anaphoric interpretations of the null subjects in question. In other words, the test results suggest that a majority of the participants abided by sub-maxims (a) and (c) of Levinson’s I-principle, which instruct recipients to assume that stereotypical relations obtain between referents or events as long as they are consistent with what is taken for granted, and to prefer coreferential readings of pronouns and zeros. CS (2) was constructed to seek evidence of the I-principle’s Recipient’s Corollary and to also explore the extent to which antecedent salience and knowledge of a familiar ‘scene’ and ‘frame’ of speaking would influence listeners’ interpretations of anaphoric null subjects, Tannen (1979) describes Fillmore’s choice of the termframe to refer to “any system of linguistic choices that can get associated with prototypical instances of scenes”, and the term scene to refer to “any kind of coherent segment of human beliefs, actions, experiences or imaginings” (Tannen, 1979: 143, citing Fillmore, 1975: 124). For CU (2a) it was hypothesized that the subject NP Amalia would be interpreted as the antecedent of the null subject of the verb preguntb (‘asked’) in the subordinate clause, since Amalia is the most salient NP in the utterance at the point at which the null anaphor is occurs. Also, the first conjoined sentence in CU (2a) introduces a scene, that of a fruit seller’s stand at a market, while the second conjunct incorporates a frame involving a common question associated with this scene. The question, which is often asked by customers seeking a place in line at a market stand (but could also be asked by the seller), is ~Qui&z tiene la vez? (‘Whose turn is it?‘). Therefore, in addition to aboutness (i.e. the salience of the subject NP Amalia), the use of stereotypical language in the situation depicted would be most consistent with an I-implicature of coreference between the antecedent Amalia and the anaphoric null subject of pregunt6 (‘asked’).

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Table 2 CS (2) (Total N = 105)

(24 Esta mafiana en el mercado habfa mucha gente en el frutero, y Amalia estaba esperando un buen rato hasta que por fin 0 pregunto: LQuitn tiene la vez? this morning in the market there-were many people in the fruit-seller, and Amalia was waiting a good while until that for end pro asked-3sg: who has the turn ‘This morning at the market there were many people at the fruit seller’s, and Amalia was waiting a good while until finally (he/she) asked: Whose turn is it?

(24 LQuiCn pregunto, iquien tiene la vez? who asked-3sg.: who has the turn ‘Who asked: iWhose turn is it?’ a. mucha gente ‘many people’ b. Amalia ‘Amalia’

c. el frutero ‘the fruit seller’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (2a)

N

%

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

1 0.95

95 90.48

4 3.81

5 4.76

105 100.00

(2b) Esta mafiana en el mercado habia mucha gente en el frutero, y Amalia estaba esperando un buen rato hasta que por fin 0 preguntb: iA quien le toca ahora? this morning in the market there-were a-lot people in the fruit-seller, and Amalia was waiting a good while until that for end pro asked-3sg: to whom him/her-dat. touches now ‘This morning at the market there were a lot of people at the fruit seller’s, and Amalia was waiting a good while until finally (he/she) asked: Whose turn is it now?

(2b) LQuiCn pregunto: ia quien le toca ahora? who asked: to whom him/her-dat. touches now ‘Who asked: Whose turn is it now?’ a. Amalia ‘Amalia’ b. el frutero ‘the fruit seller’

c. mucha gente ‘many people’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for 2b

N %

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

76 72.38

23 21.90

2 1.90

4 3.81

105 100.00

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In contrast, it was hypothesized that CU (2b) might result in the listeners’ choosing elfrutero (‘the fruit seller’) as the antecedent of the zero subject of the verb preguntd, due to the fact that the question iA quikn le tocu ahoru? (‘Whose turn is it?‘) is more likely to be asked by sellers in a Spanish market than by customers. Thus, it might constitute a linguistic frame associated with the scene depicted. A different reading assigned to CU (2b) would mean that the listeners’ relied on their preexisting expectations about what a fruit seller normally says in this situation, that is, on a linguistic frame; and it would also imply that such frame-based inferences can override simple I-implicatures of coreference based on antecedent salience and/or the application of the parallel function strategy, which, as noted earlier, refers to the general tendency to assign of antecedentship to NPs that have the same grammatical function as the anaphoric expression. The comprehension test results reflect the intervention of the consistency constraint of background knowledge in the way of preexisting frames associated with a market scene, but only slightly. For CU (2a), 90% of the respondents interpreted the null subject as referring anaphorically to Amaliu, thus demonstrating that when linguistic frames occur as expected, they serve to confirm these expectations and disambiguate anaphoric references. The listeners’ familiarity with the stereotypical frame appears to have reinforced the preference for coreference from the use of a minimal expression (zero) predicted by Levinson’s I-principle. Simultaneously, the choice of the last relevant and most salient subject NP Amuliu as the antecedent is in keeping with the aboutness constraint on anaphora and the parallel function strategy. In other words, 90% of the listeners’ inferences of coreference may be attributed to the occurrence of a minimal expression in the utterance, the salience of the antecedent chosen, and knowledge of a stereotypical frame shared by participants. For (2b), 72% of the listeners chose the same antecedent (Am&u) as they had for (2a). The fact that a majority of the listeners selected this antecedent suggests that the salience of the NP Amuliu strongly influenced their interpretations of coreference. However, because the question iA quie’n le tocu uhoru? in (2b) does not fully match Spanish listeners’ expectations based on their idea of a prototypical market scene with its corresponding frame of speaking, some respondents chose the altemative potential antecedent. In other words, there was a slight mismatch or ‘clash’ between what Spanish listeners typically expect a customer to say to take her place in a line at a Spanish market and what was actually heard in CU (2b). This may explain why the coreference relation in (2b) may have seemed more ambiguous to the listeners, which in turn led some of them to choose an alternative potential antecedent, elfrutero (‘the fruit seller’). In the follow-up interviews, several of the participants felt that either of the questions, iQuie’n tiene la vez? (‘Whose turn is it’) in (2a) or iA quie’n le tocu uhoru? (‘Whose turn is it now’) in (2b) could be uttered by the customer, Amuliu, although some participants agreed that the latter question was more likely to be uttered by the vendor. However, one participant pointed out that if the speaker had intended the fruit seller (eEfiutero) to be the one to ask iA quie’n le tocu uhoru?, the speaker would have stated “. . por fin el vendedor preguntb . ..” (‘finally the vendor asked’). Such comments reflect the pragmatic assumption that speakers try to avoid

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ambiguity, and that, if the speaker had intended the NP el frutero (‘the fruit seller’) to be the antecedent of the null subject in question, she would have given this NP a grammatically and pragmatically more salient role in the utterance. The results from both utterances comprising CS (2) support the preference for coreferential interpretations of minimal NPs predicted by the I-principle, since for both utterances more than 95% of the respondents interpreted the zero anaphor as referring back to one of the potential antecedents. In addition, the results reveal the tendency on the part of a majority of the listeners to choose the most salient potential antecedent, as long as this choice is not entirely at odds with their preexisting mental representations of stereotypical scenes and events (i.e. schemata) and frames of discourse. Yet, because some of the listeners’ expectations of a typical frame of speaking may not have been met in the case of (2b), these respondents chose an alternative antecedent, which may have been more in keeping with their own framebased expectations. For CS (3), two plausible interpretations were hypothesized. One was that the null subject in Q, Ze encanta (‘he loves (it)‘; but literally, ‘(it) enchants him’) might be interpreted as referring anaphorically to un campamento de veruno (‘a summer camp’), due to the background assumption that children typically like summer camp. On the other hand, the subject NP modified by a relative clause, mi sobrino Daniel, al que nunca Ee gustaban Zos idiomas (‘my nephew Daniel, who never liked languages’) might lead listeners to select the antecedent ingle’s (‘English’) due to the contextual information introduced in the relative clause al que nunca le gustaban Zos idiomas (‘who never liked languages’). For (3b), however, it was hypothesized that the inclusion of the adverbial ahoru (‘now’) would help to disambiguate the utterance by establishing a more coherent link between the information in the relative clause and the ensuing coordinate clause. That is, the background information that ‘Daniel never liked languages before’ and the added information that ‘IZOW he loves it’, provided in CU (3b), were expected to promote a coreferential reading between inglks (‘English’) and the null subject in question. The responses to the question posed for CU (3a) reveal that 65% of the participants interpreted the anaphoric null subject and the antecedent ingZ.h (‘English’) coreferentially, while 30% chose un campamento de verano (‘a summer camp’) as the antecedent. However, in the case of CU (3b), the incorporation of the expression ahoru (‘now’) in the utterance generated a higher rate of consensus among the listeners, as 88% of the participants interpreted the null subject as referring anaphoritally to inglks (‘English’), as opposed to 9% who chose el campamento (‘the camp’). The fact that a majority of the listeners chose inglks as the antecedent for both utterances in this set suggests that listeners may have applied two inferencing processes, one known as ‘bridging’ (Clark and Haviland, 1977) and another called ‘inferred causation’ (Geis and Zwicky, 1971) in the process of anaphora interpretation. More specifically, in order to infer that inglks (‘English’) was the antecedent of the null subject in @ Ze encantu (‘he loves (it)‘), the listeners may have presupposed through a bridging inference that ‘English is one of the languages that Daniel never liked’. In addition, through the process of inferred causation, whereby, according to

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922 Table (3) CS 3 (Total N = 105)

(34 Mi sobrino Daniel, al que nunca le gustaban 10s idiomas, ha ido a un campamento de verano para aprender ingles y 0 le encanta. my nephew Daniel, to-the that never to-him pleased the languages, has gone to a camp of summer for learn-inf. English and pro him enchants ‘My nephew Daniel, who never liked languages, has gone to a summer camp to learn English and he loves (it)‘.

@a) iQuC le encanta a Daniel? what him enchants to Daniel What does Daniel love? a. el campamento ‘the camp’ b. estudiar ‘to study’

c. el ingles ‘English’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (3a)

N

%

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

31 29.52

1 0.95

68 64.76

5 4.76

105 100.00

(3b) Mi sobrino Daniel, al que nunca le gustaban 10s idiomas, ha ido a un campamento de verano para aprender ingles y ahora 0 le encanta. my nephew Daniel, to-the that never to-him pleased the languages, has gone to a camp of summer for learn-inf. English and now pro to-him enchants ‘My nephew Daniel, who never liked languages, has gone to a summer camp to learn English and now he loves (it)‘.

(3b) ~Qut le encanta a Daniel? what him enchants to Daniel What does Daniel love? a. estudiar ‘to study’ b. el ingles ‘English’

c. el campamento ‘the camp’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (3b)

N %

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

2 1.90

92 87.62

9 8.57

2 1.90

105 100.00

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Geis and Zwicky (1971: 564), “sentences which express a temporal sequence of situations invite the inference that the first situation is a cause of or reason for the second”, the listeners inferred that going to camp to learn English caused Daniel to like English. This inferencing process, which may explain the respondents’ coreference interpretations for both (3a) and (3b), can be summarized as follows: (12) Propositions arising from CS 3 a. A Daniel nunca le gustaban 10s idiomas. ‘Daniel never liked languages’. b. Daniel ha ido a un campamento de verano para aprender ingles. ‘Daniel has gone to summer camp to learn English’. Bridging inference arising from (a) and (6): c. El ingles es uno de 10s idiomas que nunca le gustaban a Daniel.

‘English is one of the languages that Daniel never liked’. Inferred causation arising from (b) and (c):

d. Despues de ir al campamento de verano para aprender inglbs, (ahora) 0 le encanta. ‘After going to the summer camp to learn English, (now) he loves (it)‘. In this inferencing scheme, (12a) and (12b) are the two propositions communicated by both contrasting utterances, and (12~) and (12d) are the two inferences that may be drawn from the content of both utterances in CS (3) in the process of anaphora interpretation. The complexity of this inferencing process may help explain the lower consensus among the listeners with regard to their anaphora interpretations for (3a). At the same time, the increased consensus among the listeners with regard to their anaphora interpretations for (3b) reveals the effects of inferred causation, since the inclusion of the adverbial ahora (‘now’) appears to have more clearly ‘invited’ the inference of causation expressed in (12d). In the follow-up interviews, the most frequently occurring reason given for preferring a coreference relation between the zero anaphor and inglks (‘English’) involved the speaker’s explicitly stating that ‘before he didn’t like languages’ (antes no le gustaban 10s idiomas). Several participants argued that the inclusion of this phrase in the utterance led them to choose inglt% with no reservations. These comments suggest that, hypothetically speaking (since the utterances were contrived), if the speaker hadn’t intended ingls as the antecedent, she wouldn’t have introduced the related information in the relative clause al que nunca le gustaban 10s idiomas (‘who never liked languages’), which seems to have induced the inferences outlined in (12). The utterances in CS (4) are characterized by two coordinated sentences plus a third sentence. While the first conjuncts in both utterances are the same, they differ with respect to their second conjuncts and third sentences in terms of both structure and content (see Table 4). For CU (4a), it was hypothesized that the zero subjects of the preterit verbs tomaron (‘(they) drank’), bailaron (‘(they) danced’), and lo pasaron bien (‘(they) had a good time’) would result in a straightforward I-implicature of coreference between the zero anaphors and the last relevant and most salient subject NP, Luis y Andrks, thus reflecting Levinson’s basic pattern of anaphora and the

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I-principle. However, the incorporation of the rhetorical question is&es lo que haciun alli? (‘do you know what they were doing there? ‘) and the use of third-person plural verbs in the imperfect in (4b), which describe what was going on (as opposed to simply reporting events), was expected to promote the selection of an alternative antecedent for the null subjects in question. More specifically, the switch from use of the preterit (fueron, ‘went’, 3~1) in the first conjunct, to verbs in the imperfect in the rhetorical question y 2 s&es lo que haciun alli (‘and you know what (they) were doing there?‘) and tomabun (‘were drinking/drank’, 3~1) and ha&n (‘were doing/did’) could be interpreted as indicating a shift from the speaker’s focus on the referents Luis y Andres and what they did, to a focus on the party and what was going on there. This shift in point of view, which is supported by the use of the locative alli (‘there’) in the question and the subsequent enumeration of the stereotypical activities in progress at the party through the use of imperfect verb aspect, might be responsible for an alternative coreferential reading for (4b). The results of (4a), in which the preterit was used, supported the hypothesis of an I-implicated coreferential interpretation. Ninety-six percent of the listeners interpreted the zero NPs as coreferential with the only possible antecedent NP, Luis y And&s (‘Luis and Andres’). This outcome instantiates the I-principle’s predicted preference for coreferential readings of minimal NPs. On the other hand, for (4b), in which the imperfect was used, even though the only expressed NP in the utterance that could serve as a linguistic antecedent was Luis y And&s, 49% of the respondents chose a referentially implicit or ‘inferred’ antecedent, todas las personas en lufiesta de1 sdbudo (‘all the people at the party on Saturday’), which is inclusive of the referent expressed by the NP Luis y Andrks. These results suggest that the switch in point of view expressed by the change in verb aspect to the imperfect and by the use of the locative alli (‘there’) influenced approximately half of the listeners’ anaphora interpretations. At the same time, their choice of antecedent may constitute an inference based on a familiar or stereotypical party script.r6 Yet, the fact that for (4b), 29% and 20% of the subjects chose the other two antecedents, Luis y And&s and Todas las personas en la fiesta, salvo Luis y Andrks (‘All the people at the party, except Luis and At&es’), respectively, reveals a relatively high degree of disagreement with regard to the participants’ interpretations of coreference. Nevertheless, only three respondents selected ‘don’t know’ as their answer, which indicates that the utterance was not perceived as ambiguous. One explanation for these results is the fact that Spanish third-person plural verbs occurring with null subjects are commonly used in Spanish when the ‘they’ is indefinite or unspecified and thus receives an ‘arbitrary’ interpretation (Sufier, 1983). According to Sufier, when third-person plural verbs with empty subjects are used to indicate arbitrariness of reference in Spanish, “it is immaterial for what is being stated to identify the referents” (1983: 189). In other words, this linguistic convention of the language helps explain the listeners’ choice of the other, more inclusive, potential antecedents in the multiplechoice test. I6 &hank and Abelson (1977) use the term script to refer to a stereotypical event sequence. The notion of ‘script’ may be viewed as being entailed by that of ‘schemata’ (the plural of ‘schema’), which refer to “mental representations of typical instances” (Cook, 1994: 11).

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Table 4 CS (4) (Total N = 105)

(44 Luis y And& fueron a esa fiesta el sabado pasado y alli 0 tomaron muchas copas, 0 bailaron; en fin, 0 se lo pasaron bomba. Luis and Andres went to that party the Saturday last and there pro took3pl many drinks, pro danced-3pl; in end, pro3-refl it passed bomb ‘Luis and Andres went to that party last Saturday and there (they) had a lot of drinks, (they) danced; in short, (they) had a blast’.

(44 LQuienes tomaron copas y bailaron? who-p1 took3pl drinks and danced-3pl ‘Who had drinks and danced?’ a. Todas las personas en la fiesta de1 sabado ‘All the people at the party on Saturday’

b. Luis y And&s ‘Luis and Andres’

c. Todos 10s que fueron a la fiesta, salvo Luis y Andres ‘All those who went to the party, except Luis and Andres’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (4a)

N

%

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

2 1.90

101 96.19

1 0.95

1 0.95

105 100.00

(4b) Luis y And& fueron a esa fiesta el sabado pasado, y jsabes lo que 0 hacian alli? Pues, 0 tomaban drogas, alcohol y, en fin, 0 ha&n de todo. Luis and Andres went to that party the Saturday past, and know-2sg it that pro did-imperf3pl there? Well, pro took-imperf-3pl drugs, alcohol and, in end, pro did-imperf-3pl of all. ‘Luis and Andres went to that party last Saturday, and you know what (they) were doing there? Well, (they) were taking drugs, alcohol and, in the end, (they) were doing everything’.

(4b) LQuiCnes tomaban drogas y alcohol? Who-p1 took-imperf.-pl drugs and alcohol Who were taking/took drugs and alcohol? ’ a. Luis y And& ‘Luis and Andres’ b. Todas las personas en la fiesta, salvo Luis y Andres ‘all the people at the party, except Luis and Andres’

Todas las personas en la fiesta de1 sabado ‘all the people at the party on Saturday’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’ C.

Values for (4b)

N %

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

30 28.57

21 20.00

51 48.57

3 2.86

105 lOO.00

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In the follow-up interviews, most of the participants agreed that all of the answers listed in the multiple-choice question were plausible. A few of the younger participants (25 years and younger) noted that people at parties usually drink, etc., thus suggesting that inference to stereotype had influenced their responses. Interestingly, one of them observed that it was hard to tell by the speaker’s expression what she meant, which points to the fact that the way in which a speaker utters the words in a message, including pauses, intonation, and body language, may often be the factor that disambiguates the intended meaning of anaphoric expressions in such utterances. Thus, for utterances such as (4b), choice of verb aspect, the possibility of arbitrariness of reference associated with null subjects and third person plural verbs in Spanish, and the stereotypical script associated with the situation depicted in the utterance (a party) may together be responsible for promoting different interpretations for the reduced NT’s in (4b). 5.2.2. Summary Analysis of the results from CSs (l)-(4) shows that the listeners’ inferences of coreference were clearly influenced by their background assumptions and expectations based on stereotypical scripts, scenes, and frames. In other words, their interpretations of the anaphoric null subjects in question needed to be consistent with their real-world political, cultural, and experience-based knowledge, which can be assumed to be shared by the members of the Spanish community. We observed substantial increases in the degree to which hearers selected the same antecedent when the influence of a particular ‘consistency constraint’ promoting a particular interpretation of coreference was obvious. For example, listeners’ interpretations of (1 a) and (1 b) demonstrate that when an inference of coreference in an utterance arises from listeners’ assumptions based on generally shared stereotypical roles, there is a strong consensus among the listeners with regard to coreference assignment. The results from CS (2) suggest that less stereotypical or predetermined frames of discourse (for instance, utterances that can be associated with prototypical scenes, but don’t necessarily have to be associated with them) result in greater ambiguity and thus a lower consensus among listeners with regard to coreference. In the case of CU (3a), the relatively low consensus among the listeners regarding their interpretations of the null subjects can be explained by the fact that in order to interpret coreference in this utterance, listeners could not rely solely on the salience of the antecedent and the use of a minimal form to infer coreference (a straightforward I-implicature from the use of a minimal form), or on a highly stereotypical preexisting script or frame. Instead, a series of inferences needed to be drawn based on the content of the utterance and the series of assumptions or presuppositions that the utterance itself generated. However, when the linguistic features of the utterance more clearly pointed to one of the possible antecedents in (3b), there was a higher degree of consensus with regard to the coreference interpretation. Finally, the virtually unanimous preference for I-implicated coreference in CU (4a) may be attributed to the fact that there was only one potential antecedent and therefore coreference could be inferred entirely on the basis of the linguistic content of the utterance itself. That is, a straightforward I-implicature of coreference between a minimal zero

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anaphora and the only antecedent in the context was generated, since this interpretation was perfectly consistent with grammatical, pragmatic, and semantic constraints on coreference (the default interpretation). In contrast, the lack of agreement among the listeners with regard to coreference in (4b) illustrates that the use of minimal forms preceded by only one potential NP antecedent does not always result in a default implicature of coreference, since numerous factors may come into play in the interpretation process, including changes in point of view indicated by a change in verb aspect, the speaker’s intonation and phrasing of the utterance, which may communicate her intended meaning, and the conventional features of the language, such as the impersonal, non-specific or ‘arbitrary’ interpretation often associated with subjectless third-person verbs in Spanish. 5.3. Testing the M-principle 5.3.1. Results and discussion The utterances examined in this section were contrived to investigate the effects of semantic and pragmatic consistency constraints on coreference in light of Levinson’s prediction that the use of a prolix (non-minimal) and thus ‘marked’ lexical NP instead of a pronoun or zero will, by virtue of the M-principle, implicate non-coreference. For this portion of the study, it was hypothesized that one or more of the consistency constraints could override such an interpretation from the use of marked NP. In particular, the CUs were designed to measure the effects of semantic entailments on hearers’ interpretations of full NPs occurring in contexts where the use of a more minimal form, either a pronoun or zero, might normally be interpreted coreferentially. CSs (5)-(g) involve the use of a pronoun or a null subject in the (a) utterances versus a lexical NP in the same environment in the corresponding (b) utterances. According to Levinson’s scheme, the pronouns and zeros should induce coreferential interpretations, whereas the full lexical NPs in the (b) utterances should promote alternative readings. CU (5a), which is also discussed in Blackwell (2000: 409410), involves the use of the pronoun ells (‘her’) in a context where a reflexive (si misma, ‘herself’) could have been used to grammatically encode coreference. According to Levinson (1987b), the semantically weaker, non-reflexive pronoun ella (‘her’) should give rise to a non-coreferential reading, since a semantically stronger reflexive ‘si’ form, si misma (‘herself’), could have been used anaphorically in its place but was not. Levinson maintains that this pattern of interpretation may be accounted for by his neo-Gricean Q(uantity)-principle, which instructs speakers not to provide statements that are informationally weaker than their knowledge of the world allows, while instructing listeners to assume that the speaker is making the strongest statement consistent with what s/he knows (see Levinson, 1987b: 401). However, for (5a) it was hypothesized that the semantics of the sentence could cancel this predicted contrast in reference between a non-clitic reflexive and a pronoun. As the results in Table 5 reveal, this hypothesis was confirmed, since 93% of the respondents interpreted la Carmencita (literally, ‘the Carmencita’), the only potential antecedent in

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the utterance, as the antecedent of the pronoun eflu (‘her’). As I argue in Blackwell (2OOO),these results can be explained by the fact that the semantic content of the second clause in CU (5a), which translates to ‘0 always insists on getting her own way’, is more consistent with the semantics of the first clause, which means ‘Carmencita only worries about her’, when the pronoun ellu (‘her’) is interpreted coreferentially. The listeners’ overwhelming preference for coreference, where Levinson’s framework predicted non-coreference, also lends support for the notion that consistency constraints on coreference can play a larger role in coreference assignment than the type of NP expressions used, since the listeners’ responses to (5a) appear to be based on the semantics of the utterance rather than the occurrence of a non-reflexive pronoun in this context. DeMello (1996) reports that in many dialects of Spanish, third-person non-reflexive pronouns such eEZa(‘her’) in (5a) are often used in prepositional phrases in place of reflexive ‘si’ forms (e.g. si misma) to indicate the same anaphoric relation, particularly in conversational discourse. However, DeMello’s data show that reflexives are used more frequently than non-reflexive pronouns in prepositional phrases when an anaphoric reading is intended. This suggests that use of the construction in (5b), se preocupa por ells (‘worries about her’) would be less likely to occur in natural speech when an anaphoric reading is intended. l7 DeMello concludes, however, that where the alternation can occur, the choice of pronominal form depends on semantic factors, and must be explained by the context of use, as opposed to predictable rules and structural features. This observation by DeMello supports the explanation proposed in the present study to account for the results of CU (5a). In CU (5b), the name Carmencita occurred in place of the pronoun ells (‘her’) that was used in (5a). Recall that Huang (1991, 1994) proposes that semantic entailments can override implicatures of non-coreference which are predicted by the Mprinciple, when a marked lexical NP is used where an unmarked, minimal form would otherwise implicate coreference. If the listeners interpreted la Carmencitu and Carmencitu (a marked NP) in (5b) coreferentially, we could attribute the cancellation of the M-implicated contrast in reference to the consistency constraint of semantic entailment. Carter (1987) refers to anaphoric relations involving semantic entailments, such as the one predicted in (5b), using Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) term reiteration. These relations involve lexical cohesion, whereby identical or semantically related lexical items occur together in a text: “In the case of reiteration, an approximate information constraint usually operates: that is, the anaphoric lexical item must usually contain no information that its antecedent lacks. This is because the function of an anaphor is typically to access given information rather than to introduce new.” (Carter, 1987: 41)

Carter uses the following example to illustrate his point (1987: 41):

I7 The utterances included on the multiple-choice test were contrived, and prior to carrying out the study, they were judged by native speakers of Spanish to be grammatically ‘feasible’, which does not necessarily imply that the utterances would actually occur in natural speech.

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Table 5 CS (5) (Total N = 105)

(54 iLa Carmencita s610 se preocupa por ells y siempre insiste en sake

con la suya! the Carmencita only 3 refl. worries for her and always insists on leave-inf.-self with the hers ‘Carmencita only worries about her and always insists on getting her own way’.

(54 LDe quitn se preocupa la Carmencita? of whom reflex.-3 worries the Carmencita Who does Carmencita worry about? c. de si misma ‘about herself d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

a. de su hermana menor ‘about her younger sister’ b. de su hija ‘about her daughter’ Values for (5a)

N %

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

1 0.95

2 1.90

98 93.33

4 3.81

105 100.00

(5b) iLa Carmencita s610 se preocupa por Carmencita y siempre insiste en salirse con la suya! the Carmencita only 3 refl. worries for Carmencita and always insists on leave-inf.-self with the hers ‘Carmencita only worries about Carmencita and always insists on getting her own way’.

(5b) LDe quien se preocupa la Carmencita? of whom 3 refl. worries the Carmencita Who does Catmencita worry about? a. de su hija, que tambien se llama Carmencita ‘about her daughter, who is also named Carmencita b. de su madre, que tambien se llama Carmencita about her mother, who is also named Carmencita

c. de si misma ‘about herself d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (5b)

N

%

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

28 26.67

6 5.71

68 64.76

3 2.86

105 100.00

(13) John has bought a new car. The (car/vehicle/thing/?Jaguar) speed.

goes at quite a

Here, Carter points out, the use of the Jaguar to refer anaphorically is odd, since it introduces new information, while being marked through use of the definite article, as anaphoric.

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Sixty-five percent of the respondents selected the subject NP la Carmencitu (‘the Carmencita’) as the antecedent of Curmencita in (5b), while 27% thought that the name Carmencitu referred to a referent not previously mentioned in the utterance (i.e. a new referent), namely, la hija de la Carmencita (literally, ‘the daughter of the Carmencita’). Thus, approximately two-thirds of the respondents interpreted Carmencita as a reiterated NP, that is, as semantically entailed by the subject la Carmencita.

Interestingly, the follow-up interviews revealed that listeners strongly disagreed on the meaning of the NP Carmencitu. Some insisted that this NP referred to the same person as the previous NP, la Carmencita, whereas others insisted that it had to refer to another person altogether. This disagreement among the participants may imply that the form ‘definite article + first name’ (e.g. la Carmencitu) which is frequently heard in informal speech in Aragon where the data was collected,‘8 may have a particular meaning for some who use the form, while others may not attach any particular significance to it. According to Fematrdez Ramfrez (1987), the definite article is used with names in narrative and historical prose much the same way demonstratives are used with names, as in el Don Carlos (‘the Sir Carlos’) and este Don kxzro (‘this Sir Alvaro’) (1987: 176). However, he notes that the definite article with a proper name is used in colloquial speech for either first or subsequent mentions of a referent, and is often used when the speaker wants to be emphatic or to refer pejoratively to the referent. The definite article is also used with nicknames of famous bullfighters, as in el Belmontillo de Madrid (‘the Belmontillo of Madrid’) and with names of famous female actresses, for instance la Prendes (‘the Prendes’) or la Greta Garbo (‘the Greta Garbo’; Fernandez Ramfrez, 1987: 178). However, Femkrdez Ramfrez claims that use of the construction is decreasing in general in the speech of educated Madrilians. Nevertheless, he alludes to the fact that the construction is still deeply rooted in rural dialects of Spanish, particularly where female names are used, as in, for instance, such as la Sabina, la Eleuteria, la Pascuala, la Rosario (1987: 179). These observations suggest that the respondents who interpreted la Carmencita and Carmencita coreferentially may use the construction frequently themselves, as if these were ‘repeated nouns’ being used to refer to the same referent twice for emphasis (c.f. Bolinger, 1979). On the other hand, the participants who interpreted the NPs non-coreferentially may not use the construction in their everyday speech, and thus may have associated the definite article with a name as a way of singling out a particular person, thus rendering the subsequent NP without the article as contrastive in reference. CS (6) is characterized by two juxtaposed sentences. The (a) utterance involves a subject pronoun e’l (‘he’), which occurs after a null subject (0 es siempre primer0 . . ., I8 This observation was confiied by one educated, native speaker of Spanish from Zaragoza, the capital of the region of Aragon (Spain), but it does not imply that other speakers of Spanish from other regions of the Spanish-speaking world do not use the construction. In fact, one anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this article pointed out that the use of definite articles with proper names (e.g. la Marfa, ‘the Maria’) is also common in Catalan, the language spoken in the region of Catalonia, which borders on Aragon, a region that was historically within Catalan dialect boundaries.

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‘(he) is always first .,. ‘). According to Levinson’s basic pattern of anaphora, reversion to a pronoun after zero in (6a) should implicate a disjoint reading, since the speaker could have used a minimal null subject in place of the pronoun to I-implicate coreference with the last relevant NP, Jouquin, which is the subject of the first sentence and is followed by an appostive NP, el hermano de Zgnacio (‘Ignacio’s brother’). Also, as seen in Section 3, overt subject pronouns, when used in place of null subjects, often give rise to contrasts in reference, so we might expect the overt pronoun in (6a) to implicate a contrast. In addition, there is another potential antecedent in the utterance, namely, Zgnacio. However, this NP is the complement in a prepositional phrase, and is therefore not as grammatically salient in the discourse context as the name Jouquin. Following Huang’s hierarchy of antecedent saliency, which places topics and subjects ahead of objects in terms of degree of prominence in the discourse context, and thus of their likelihood to serve as antecedents, the name Zgnucio is an unlikely antecedent in the absence of any other consistency constraints to promote its choice. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the pronoun in (6a) would involve a straightforward I-implicature of coreference with Jouquin, following Levinson’s generalization that a reduced pronominal form “tends to pick up reference from the last relevant NP (preferably a subject)” (1987b: 383). In CU (6b), a lexical NP, el nirio (‘the child’, masc. or ‘the little boy’) is used in place of the subject pronoun e’l (‘he’). I hypothesized that the contrast in reference predicted by Levinson’s M-principle, when a full lexical NP is used in place of a semantically minimal NP, would be overridden in the case of (6b) due to the listeners’ stereotypical background assumptions and preexisting schemata. That is, I expected hearers to infer coreference between the lexical NP el nirio and the subject of the first sentence, Jouquin (‘Joaquin’) as a result of the stereotypical assumptions arising from the information given in the first sentence and the hearers’ schema associated with the word el nifio (‘the little boy’). More specifically, the hearers would infer that Joaquin was a school-aged boy from the information Q es siempre el primer0 en lus uulus (‘(he)‘s always first in the classrooms’, i.e. ‘at the top of his class’). This assumption would in turn make it plausible to refer to Jouquin anaphorically later in the utterance, using the semantically general yet linguistically more prolix expression ef nifio. In other words, the M-implicature of non-coreference, which is predicted when a marked lexical NP occurs, would be canceled because such a contrast in reference would be inconsistent with listeners’ stereotypical assumptions generated by the contextual material in the utterance itself and their preexisting, stereotypical, mental representations, or schemata associated with the situation depicted and the NP el nirio. The test results lend support for the hypotheses proposed for both (6a) and (6b). All of the participants interpreted the pronoun in (6a) as referring anaphorically to the subject Jouquin. They appear to have adhered to Levinson’s I-principle by assigning a coreferential reading to the pronoun which was consistent with their assumptions about stereotypical relations between the referents and events described, even though the sub-maxim instructing speakers to say as little as necessary (i.e. use zero) was breached in the utterance. Furthermore, the aboutness constraint on coreference, which predicts that the most salient NP in the context will be what the

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Table 6 CS (6) (Total N = 105)

(64 Joaquin, el hermano de Ignacio, es muy aplicado y 0 es siempre el primer0 en las aulas. Fuera de ellas e’l es el que mas hate refr a 10s demh con sus gracias. Joaquin, the brother of Ignacio, is very studious and pro is always the first in the classrooms. Outside of them he is the that more makes laugh-inf. act. the rest with his antics Joaquin, Ignacio’s brother, is very studious and is always at the top of his class. Outside of it he’s the one who makes everyone else laugh the most with his antics’.

(64 LQuien hate reir con sus gracias? who makes laugh-inf. with his antics Who makes (people) laugh with his antics? a. Joaquin ‘Joaquin’ b. Ignacio ‘Ignacio’

c. un compaiiero de clase ‘a classmate’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for 6a

N

%

a.

Total

105 100.00

105 100.00

Joaquin, el hermano de Ignacio, es muy aplicado y 0 es siempre el primer0 en las aulas. Fuera de ellas el nifio es el que mas hate refr a 10s demas con sus gracias. Joaquin, the brother of Ignacio, is very studious and pro is always the first in the classrooms. Outside of them the child-masc. is the that more makes laugh-i& act. the rest with his antics Joaquin, Ignacio’s brother, is very studious and is always at the top of his class. Outside of it the little boy is the one who makes everyone else laugh the most with his antics’.

(6b) LQuiCn hate reir con sus gracias? who makes laugh-inf. with his antics Who makes (people) laugh with his antics? a. un compaiiero de clase ‘a classmate’ b. Ignacio ‘Ignacio’

c. Joaquin ‘Joaquin’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (6b)

N %

a.

C.

d.

Total

2 1.90

96 91.43

7 6.67

105 100.00

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discourse is about, and therefore is the most likely NP to be referred to anaphorically, promoted the coreference interpretation inferred by the participants. These results show how M-contrasts in reference from the use of a ‘marked’ subject pronoun in place of a null subject can evaporate when they are inconsistent with the aboutness constraint on anaphora and with assumptions based on knowledge of stereotypical relations. For CU (6b), 91% of the respondents interpreted the lexical NP el nifio (‘the little boy’) and the subject Joaquin coreferentially, while seven participants responded ‘don’t know’. This outcome suggests that the consistency constraint of aboutness, i.e. the salience of the antecedent, promoted the ‘evaporation’ of the predicted Mcontrast in reference from the use of the marked lexical NP el Go. However, the hearers’ assignment of a coreferential reading to the marked lexical NP must also be attributed to the plausibility of this interpretation, given the contextual background information provided by the content of the utterance itself, the semantics of the lexical NP el nirio, and the stereotypical assumptions one can make from the information provided. That is, we know from the utterance itself that Joaquin is Ignacio’s brother, that he is studious, and that he is at the top of his class, which in turn makes it plausible (if not probable), that Joaquin is ‘the little boy’ to which eE nifio refers. Therefore, an anaphoric reading for el niAo is entirely consistent with what we know. If, on the other hand, the lexical NP el nifio were replaced with another equally lexicalized NP, such as el viejo (‘the old man’), different results would most certainly be obtained. We can conclude, therefore, that several factors intervened in the process of coreference assignment in (6b), including antecedent salience, the semantics of the anaphoric lexical NP, and the listeners’ pragmatic assumptions derived from the linguistic context and their preexisting schemata. The respondents who participated in the follow-up interviews agreed that the interpretations of the utterances in CS (6) were obvious. They noted that both of the sentences comprising the utterances in the set were clearly about Joaquin, but they offered no further explanation for their interpretations. However, the fact that there was high consensus among the listeners with regard to the interpretations of both utterances in the set serves to further illustrate how implicatures of coreference must be in keeping with the consistency constraints, regardless of the NP type used. CSs (7) and (8) were constructed to test the effects of semantic entailments on anaphora interpretation in light of Levinson’s M-based prediction of non-coreference from the use of a marked lexical NP in place of a minimal pronoun or zero. The hypotheses formed for these CSs were based on the concept of scalar quantity implicatures (see Levinson, 1983: 132-136). It is sufficient to recall that scalar implicatures involve two contrastive linguistic expressions of the same grammatical category that can be arranged in linear order by degree of informativeness or semantic strength such that the use of the stronger item semantically entails the weaker one, but not vice versa, as in the case of the set , where all entails some, but some does not mean all (Levinson 1983: 133). Each of the utterances in CS (7) involves two brief coordinated sentences, whereas the utterances comprising CS (8) are characterized by much longer coordinate constructions, with two subordinate clauses in the first coordinate. However, both CSs are characterized by the use of a null subject in the (a) utterances and a full

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lexical NP in the same environment in their respective (b) utterances. It was hypothesized that the use of null subjects in both (7a) and (8a) would induce I-implicatures of coreference with the subject NPs Juan and el Cordob& (‘the Cordovan’, the nickname of a famous Spanish bullfighter), respectively, because these NPs are the most salient NPs in the utterances at the point at which their respective null subjects occur. The NPs su esposa (‘his wife’) in (7a) and Pepe in (8a) are also potential antecedents, but they are less salient NPs in the discourse context and therefore less likely to be interpreted as antecedents than the hypothesized NPs. A coreferential reading with the most salient potential antecedents would reflect the I-principle’s sub-maxims ‘prefer coreferential readings of reduced NPs (pronouns and zeros)‘, as long as they are consistent with ‘what is taken for granted’. Furthermore, such a reading would reflect the influence of antecedent salience, or of the ‘aboutness constraint’ on implicatures of coreference. On the other hand, it was hypothesized that the use of the lexical NPs, la mujer (‘the woman’ or ‘the wife’) in (7b) and el maestro (‘the master’ or ‘the teacher’) in (8b), in place of the null subjects used in the (a) utterances, would also result in coreferential readings as a result of semantic entailments. Specifically, in the case of (7b), it was predicted that the semantically stronger potential antecedent, su esposu (‘his wife’) would semantically entail the subsequent weaker NP, la mujer (‘the woman/wife’); and, likewise, the NP el Cordobks in (8b) would semantically entail el maestro (‘the master/teacher’). Therefore, semantic entailments would override Levinson’s predicted M-implicatures of non-coreference from the use of the marked lexical NPs la mujer and el maestro, and would simultaneously promote coreferential readings for these lexical NPs. The test results, which are presented in Tables 7 and 8, reveal that 83% of the respondents selected Juan as the antecedent of the null subject in (7a), while 8 1% of them interpreted el Cordobe’s as the antecedent of the null subject in (8a). These results lend support for the ‘aboutness’ suggestion that, when faced with two plausible antecedents for an anaphoric expression, listeners will tend to interpret the most salient one as the antecedent. However, in the case of (7a), eleven of the participants selected the alternative antecedent, su esposa (‘his wife’), and an additional five respondents answered ‘don’t know’. This may imply that for the portion of the respondents who chose these answers, the more salient antecedent Juan was stereotypically the less likely to ‘begin preparing dinner’ than ‘his wife’ (su esposa). In other words, for some, there may have been a ‘clash’ between the consistency constraints of antecedent salience, which promoted one interpretation (i.e. Juan as the antecedent of the null subject), and background knowledge, based on stereotypical expectations and experience, which promoted another interpretation (i.e. su mujer as the antecedent of the null subject). This clash between consistency contraints would account for the listeners’ responses to item (7a). The listeners’ responses to (8a) also reflect a possible clash between consistency constraints, since nineteen of the participants chose the alternative potential antecedent, Pepe. However, in this case, the clash seems to have occurred between two sources of background knowledge, namely, the knowledge provided by the local linguistic ‘cotext’, that is “that which immediately surrounds the word or utterance

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Table 7 CS (7) (Total N = 105) (7a) Al llegar a casa Juan besd a su esposa, y entonces @ se puso a preparar la cena. at-the arrive-h& to house Juan kissed act. his wife, and then 0 3 refl. put to prepare-inf. the dinner. ‘Upon arriving at home Juan kissed his wife, and then 0 (=he/she) began preparing dinner’. (7a) LQuien prepard la cena? who prepared-3sg. the dinner Who prepared dinner? a. Juan ‘Juan’ b. la criada ‘the maid’

la esposa de Juan ‘Juan’s wife’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’ C.

Values for (7a)

N %

a.

b.

C.

d.

Total

88

1 0.95

11 10.48

5 4.76

105 100.00

83.81

(7b) Al llegar a casa Juan bes6 a su esposa y entonces la mujer se puso a preparar la cena. at-the arrive-inf. to house Juan kissed act. his wife, and then the woman 3 refl. put to prepare-inf. the dinner. ‘Upon arriving at home Juan kissed his wife, and then the woman/wife began preparing dinner’. (7b) LQuitn prepard la cena? who prepared-3sg. the dinner Who prepared dinner? a. la esposa de Juan ‘Juan’s wife’ b. la madre de Juan ‘Juan’s mother’

c.

la criada ‘the maid’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (7b)

N %

a.

b.

C.

99 94.29

2 1.90

0.95

1

d.

Total

3 2.86

105

100.00

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Table 8 CS (8) (Total N = 105)

(84 Pepe, que es aficionado a 10s toros, ha lefdo que el Cordob& ha conseguido la mayor felicidad posible con vivir y trabajar en el campo, y ahom la piensa dedicarse de lleno a la crfa de ganado. Pepe, who is aficionado at the bulls, has read that the Cordovan has obtained the greatest happiness possible with live-i& and work-inf. in the country, and now 0 thinks dedicate&f.-3 refl. of full to the breeding of cattle ‘Pepe, who is an aficionado of bullfighting, has read that “el Cordob&” has gotten the greatest happiness possible out of living and working in the country, and now (he) is thinking of devoting himself entirely to cattle raising’.

(84 LQuiBn piensa dedicarse a la crfa de ganado? who thinks-3sg. dedicate-inf.-3 refl. to the breeding of cattle ‘Who is thinking of devoting himself to cattle raising?’ a. Pepe ‘Pepe’ b. un ganadero ‘a rancher’

c. el Cordobts ‘the Cordovan’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (8a)

N

%

a.

C.

d.

Total

19 18.10

84 80.00

2 1.90

105 100.00

@b) Pepe, que es aficionado a 10s toros, ha leido que el Cordobes ha conseguido la mayor felicidad posible con vivir y trabajar en el campo, y ahora el maestro piensa dedicarse de lleno a la crfa de ganado. Pepe, who is aficionado at the bulls, has read that the Cordovan has obtained the greatest happiness possible with live-i& and work-inf. in the country, and now the master/teacher thinks dedicate-inf.-3 refl. of full to the breeding of cattle ‘Pepe, who is an aficionado of bullfighting, has read that “el Cordobes” has gotten the greatest happiness possible out of living and working in the country, and now the master/teacher is thinking of devoting himself entirely to cattle raising’.

@b) LQuiCn piensa dedicarse a la crfa de ganado? who thinks-3sg. dedicate-inf.-3 refl. to the breeding of cattle ‘Who is thinking of devoting himself to cattle raising?’ a. un profesor ‘a professor/teacher’ b. el Cordobes ‘the Cordovan’

c. Pepe ‘Pepe’ d. No se sabe ‘Don’t know’

Values for (8b)

N

%

a.

b.

C.

Total

6 5.71

96 91.43

3 2.86

105 100.00

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in question” (Mey, 1999: 6-7), and the background knowledge of the world obtained as a byproduct of the participants’ membership in the Spanish community. The linguistic cotext provides the background information that ‘Pepe is a bullfighting aficionado’, thus giving rise to the background assumption that Pepe likes ‘bullfights’ (Zos toros). This background assumption promotes a coreferential interpretation between Pepe and the null subject in question. On the other hand, the culturally-specific background knowledge that el Cordobh, the famous Spanish bullfighter, was in fact involved in ‘cattle raising’ (la criu de gunado) promotes the alternative interpretation, which was chosen by the majority of the Spanish listeners. This cultural background knowledge is shared by those Spaniards who follow the lives of celebrities in Spain. The results obtained, therefore, may be attributed to the type of background knowledge the listeners’ utilized to draw their inferences of coreference as well as antecedent salience. As the results reveal, a majority of the listeners’ anaphora interpretations for @a) were directly influenced by their background knowledge (perhaps obtained from the Spanish tabloids) and the greater salience and the recency of the antecedent, el Cordobks, at the point at which the anaphoric null subject occurs. The contrasting (b) utterances elicited a higher consensus among the listeners than did the (a) counterparts: 94% of them interpreted su esposa (‘his wife’) and la mujer (‘the woman/wife’) coreferentially in CU (7b), and 91% of the participants interpreted el Cordobks as the antecedent of el maestro (‘the teacher/master’) in (8b). These results support my hypothesis that the marked lexical NPs would be interpreted anaphorically because they are semantically entailed by their respective antecedents. The slightly lower consensus among the listeners in the case of CS (8) may be due to the increased length of the utterances in this set, which may have made them harder for the listeners to recall and thus interpret. The participants interviewed said that the answers to the test questions corresponding to CSs (7) and (8) were obvious. They agreed that in the (b) utterances la mujer (‘the woman/wife’) meant la mujer de Juan (‘John’s wife’), and el maestro (‘the master/teacher’) clearly referred to el Cordobks. For (7a), a few of the participants argued that the zero subject in the VP 0 se puso a prepurur la cenu (‘(s/he) started making dinner’) referred back to su esposu (‘his wife’) because it was more logical for the wife to be making dinner. This explanation illustrates the importance of the listeners’ own assumptions, based on stereotypical roles, in determining anaphoric relations, and suggests that when an individual’s strong stereotypical assumptions clash with inferences of coreference that are based on antecedent salience, the stereotypical assumptions can win out. With regard to CS (8), all of the participants interviewed knew who the bullfighter ‘el Cordobes’ was, so that the interpretation of both utterances in this set appears to have been facilitated by the respondents’ cultural knowledge, which is shared by members of the Spanish community at large. The fact that the NP el maestro (‘the master’) is another name commonly used to refer to the bullfighter el Cordobks supports the notion that this bit of shared community knowledge enabled the listeners to infer a relation of coreference, since the latter NP expression semantically entails the former in Spain.

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5.3.2. Summary The data show that the use of marked lexical NPs, in environments where either a pronoun or zero would normally I-implicate coreference, did not result in an Mimplicature of non-coreference in each of the four sets of utterances tested. These findings run contrary to the prediction of the M-principle. Specifically, in each case, the use of a lexical NP, which was semantically more general than a preceding NP, resulted in a preference for a coreferential interpretation with this NP (e.g., la Carmencita . . . Carmencita; Joaquin . . . el nirio (‘the child’); su esposa (‘his wife’) . . . la mujer (‘the woman/wife’); el Cordobbs (‘the Cordovan’) . . . el maestro (‘the master/teacher’)). Furthermore, in three cases, CU (6b), (7b), and (8b), there was an extremely high consensus among listeners with respect to their coreferential readings for the lexical NPs in question. These results could be attributed to the influence of a combination of two consistency constraints: background knowledge and aboutness in CU (6b), semantic entailment and background knowledge in the case of CU (7b), and semantic entailment and aboutness in the case of CU (8b). The high degree of consensus regarding the anaphoric relations in these utterances suggests that when more than one consistency constraint promotes the same coreferential relation, anaphoric expressions are rendered less ambiguous, and thus their meanings are easier for listeners to infer, regardless of the NP type used anaphorically (e.g. zero, a pronoun, a lexical NP, etc.).

6. Conclusions The data show that patterns of preferred anaphora interpretation, as predicted by Levinson’s I- and M-principles, are influenced by the consistency constraints of background assumptions and mutual knowledge, antecedent salience, general semantic constraints, and semantic entailments, such that the principles alone cannot predict coreferential versus disjoint interpretations from the use of a particular NP expression. The consistency constraints served to override Levinson’s neo-Gricean predictions in certain contexts and strengthen the preference for a particular interpretation of coreference in utterances where there could be more than one possible interpretation for an anaphoric expression. The data reveal that the predicted contrast in reference between unmarked minimal forms (pronouns, zero) and marked lexical NPs could be canceled by the influence of one or more consistency constraints. The test results show that when two consistency constraints conflicted (that is, each constraint promoted a different interpretation), there was a lower consensus among the hearers with regard to their interpretations of an utterance. This observation suggests that different individuals utilize different sources of knowledge when drawing inferences of coreference. With regard to the power of the consistency constraints to promote coreference, the data reveal that semantic entailments and semantic constraints in general, followed by background knowledge in the way of stereotypical assumptions or expectations, influence listeners’ interpretations of anaphora more than antecedent salience. This conclusion is based on the observed tendency toward higher degrees of consensus among the listeners when they relied on the

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semantics of the utterance and/or on their own background knowledge to construe anaphoric relations. Furthermore, the results from this experiment refute the generalization proposed by Levinson (1987a,b), which states, ‘the more minimal the form, the stronger the preference will be for a coreferential reading’, since, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, full lexical NPs, whose meanings were entailed by their respective antecedents, resulted in the highest consensus in favor of a coreferential reading. In this article, I have attempted to seek empirical evidence of the ways Levinson’s neo-Gricean I- and M-principles operate in native Spanish speakers’ anaphora interpretations. Following up on Blackwell (2000), I must reemphasize that Levinson’s pragmatic principles are general rules promoting tendencies for preferred interpretation, and that there are exceptions to these tendencies, which may be explained in terms of the consistency and grammatical constraints on anaphora. In addition, the data from this experiment, presented in Blackwell (2000) and in this work, suggest that in the process of inferring relations of coreference, listeners often rely more readily on their semantic and pragmatic knowledge of language than on the type of NP expression used anaphorically by the speaker. In the present study, the listeners’ anaphora interpretations appear to have been constrained most strongly by the following factors (in this order): semantic entailments, general semantic constraints, background knowledge, and antecedent salience, and finally, with regard to the utterances tested, choice of linguistic alternates. Analysis of linguistic facts in general supports the abandonment of Levinson’s dichotomy between coreferential and disjoint, in favor of implicatures that may be +/-coreferential with a potential antecedent, since the use of marked NPs does not necessarily generate disjoint readings, but may implicate a coreference relation with an alternative potential antecedent. The data presented in this paper exhibit two tendencies also exhibited by the data analyzed in Blackwell (2000): (1) the need for anaphora interpretations to be consistent with one or more of the consistency constraints; and (2) the tendency for listeners to prefer more specific, coreferential interpretations over non-coreferential ones, even when an utterance is potentially ambiguous, as revealed by the fact that the category of response no se sabe (‘don’t know’) was almost never chosen. Instead, listeners consistently preferred to interpret pronouns and zeros anaphoritally, i.e., they tended to prefer more specific, coreferential readings of reduced NPs and thus avoided multiplying the number of entities referred to, just as the I-principle predicts.

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Sarah Blackwell received her M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College (Vermont and Madrid) and her Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh. She is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Her interests include pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse and conversation analysis, Spanish applied linguistics, SLA, and foreign language teaching. Her current research focuses on the pragmatics of Spanish NP anaphora and the analysis of Spanish narratives and conversation. Recent related publications include Blackwell (2000), “Anaphora interpretations in Spanish utterances and the neo-Gricean pragmatic theory” Hispania 81(3): 606618; (1998), “Constraints on Spanish NP anaphora: The syntactic versus the pragmatic domain’. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 389424.