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Antecedent Topicality Affects The Processing Of Both Np Anaphors And Pronoun, Evgenia Borshchevskaya

Theses and Dissertations

Information structure and grammatical constraints are known to affect the salience of discourse referents and referential processing, but it is not clear whether the two types of constraints have comparable effects. We report two visual-world experiments that contrasted the effect of a grammatical constraint (subjecthood) and the effect of an information structure constraint (fronting) on processing noun and pronoun anaphors. Experiment 1 tested whether fronting a non-subject referent can eliminate the Repeated Name Penalty (RNP; Gordon et al., 1993) when referring to the subject. Experiment 2 tested whether fronting a non-subject referent can elicit the RNP. The results show that …