Anaphoric devices in written and spoken narrative

Anaphoric devices in written and spoken narrative discourse Data from Catalan Aurora Bel, Joan Perera and Naymé Salas

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain / Universitat de Barcelona, Spain / Bangor University, United Kingdom

In this study, we focus on pronominal anaphora and we investigate the referential properties of null and overt subject pronouns in Catalan, in the semispontaneous production of narrative spoken and written texts by three groups of speakers/writers (9–10, 12–13, and 15–16 year olds). We aimed at determining (1) pronoun preferences for a specific type of antecedent; (2) their specialization in a certain discourse function; and (3) whether the pattern is affected by text modality (spoken vs. written texts). We analyzed 30 spoken and 30 written narrative texts, produced by the same 30 subjects, divided into the age groups mentioned above. Results seem fairly consistent across age groups and modalities, showing that null pronouns tend to select antecedents in subject position and are well specialized in maintaining reference, while overt pronouns offer a less clear pattern both in their selection of antecedents and in the discourse function they perform. Our findings partially support those of previous research on other nullsubject languages, in particular, the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH) formulated by Carminati (2002) for Italian. Keywords: anaphora resolution, discourse anaphora, pronouns, narrative text, spoken modality, written modality, Catalan

1. Introduction Anaphoric expressions are one of the most studied topics in linguistics. Their realization and the study of their potential antecedents have been examined in frameworks such as formal syntax (Chomsky 1981), Accessibility Theory (Ariel 1990, 2001), and Centering Theory (Gordon et al. 1993). Two key anaphoric expressions are nominal and pronominal elements, which — together with discourse markers Written Language & Literacy 13:2 (2010), 236–259. doi 10.1075/wll.13.2.03bel issn 1387–6732 / e-issn 1570–6001 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Anaphoric devices in written and spoken narrative discourse 237

and other mechanisms — act as connectivity devices in text construction. Broadly speaking, in discourse a pronoun is likely to be interpreted as denoting an entity that has already been introduced by a nominal category. Similarly to linguistics, psycholinguistic research has analyzed the factors that might influence the choice of an antecedent by the different types of anaphoric expressions. Moreover, null subject languages, such as Catalan or Spanish, allow phonetically null as well as phonetically overt subject pronouns. Subject omission has been widely explored in formal syntax, and has been linked to rich subject-verb agreement (Jaeggli & Safir 1989; Rizzi 1982) or discourse ellipsis (Huang 2000). The existence of two different types of pronouns — null and overt — has led researchers to propose that they perform different roles, both from a grammatical and a processing point of view. Nevertheless, few studies have explored this phenomenon beyond the first stages of language acquisition. In this study, we will focus on pronominal anaphora and, specifically, we will investigate the referential properties of null and overt subject pronouns in Catalan in the semi-spontaneous production of oral and written narrative texts by three groups of speakers/writers: 9–10 year olds, 12–13 year olds, and 15–16 year olds. We seek to determine whether these two types of pronouns play the same role and to what extent they contribute to discourse connectivity, both at an intra- and an inter-sentential level. Since 1st and 2nd person pronouns show a different behavior (they commonly have deictic or emphatic values), we will concentrate solely on 3rd person pronouns in subject position. 2. Pronominal anaphora in Catalan, a null subject language Whereas languages such as English disallow pronoun dropping, languages like Catalan allow null pronouns. In Catalan, verbs carry agreement marking; this makes pronouns superfluous to some extent and, consequently, they can be dropped. As a result, Catalan has two types of pronouns: null and overt. Pronouns (null and overt) carry information that helps anaphora resolution. Their use, however, is not fully optional. The choice between a noun phrase (NP), such as Peter, a doctor, the match of the day, etc., and a pronoun depends on the articulation of focus and topic — i.e. new and old information in a sentence — in order to guarantee cohesion and connectivity. According to Halliday and Hasan’s (1996) classical framework, writers have many types of connectivity patterns available at the discourse level. The conventional distinction between coherence and cohesion provides a frame to situate anaphors as cohesion devices. Following the authors, text cohesion involves linking relations such as anaphora or ellipsis, and includes linguistic elements such as referring

238 Aurora Bel, Joan Perera and Naymé Salas

expressions and pronouns. On the other hand, it is widely accepted that pronouns are related to discourse topicality and mark the topic of the current sentence, as well as of the previous sentence, thus expressing topic continuity (Givón 1983). It can be generalized that in languages such as Catalan that have null and overt pronouns, an NP introduces a referent into discourse, an overt pronoun is used to indicate a shift in topic, and a null pronoun embodies topic continuity. Additionally, an overt pronoun may convey contrastive meaning. The [±topic-shift] device in Catalan is illustrated in (1) and (2) below. When there is topic continuity (1) — i.e. no topic-shift —, the null pronoun is the preferred option. When there is a topic-shift (2), an overt third-person pronoun is used in subject position. Gaps (___) indicate a null pronoun. (1) topic continuity: En Max volia sorprendre la seva amiga i, per tant, ___ li va preparar una festa. Max wanted_3SG to surprise his friend and, then, ___ prepared_3SG her a party. (2) topic change: La Núria no va poder ensenyar el cotxe nou al seu pare perquè ell tenia una reunió de treball. Núria could_3SG not show the new car to her father because he had_3SG a work meeting.

In (2) the use of a null pronoun instead of the overt one (ell) would lead to a reading that assumes topic continuity (___ = la Núria) or would create ambiguity (___ = la Núria or el seu pare). In languages like Catalan, the overt third-person pronoun may be used in a context where topic continuity is given, but it causes redundancy, particularly when the sentence is unambiguous, as in (3) below, where there is only one potential antecedent for the pronominal element: (3) En Max ha dit que ell anirà a la festa de la seva amiga. Max AUX_3SG said that he will.go_3SG to the party of his friend.

The pronoun ell could receive stress, thus conveying contrastive meaning (e.g., he will go to the party, not another person). In the present study, tough, we did not include pronouns with such contrastive value, since they involve a different articulation of topic continuity and change that is beyond the scope of this study. Instead of the pronoun, the full NP (en Max) could be repeated, but this is not the preferred option and would not sound natural. There are few studies regarding the distribution of Catalan pronouns in discourse. The most remarkable contribution on this issue is a paper by Rigau (1989). She claims that once a referent becomes a discourse topic and occupies the subject


position, it is expressed by a null pronoun. Nevertheless, she points out some exceptions to this generalization: a. If a discourse topic in subject position is reintroduced from a clause other than the immediately preceding one, an overt pronoun (or a full NP) must be used. b. If the interpretation of the null pronoun is ambiguous, an overt pronoun is the preferred realization. c. If a subject position is interpreted as emphatic or contrastive, an overt pronoun must be used. In short, Rigau proposes that Catalan pronouns convey maintenance, change and reintroduction of discourse topics as well as contrastive meaning. This last value, as stated above, will not be considered in this paper. While most previous studies on the present topic dealt with experimental data, we aim at exploring these issues in the semi-spontaneous production of spoken and written narratives by Catalan students from 9 to 16 years of age. This way, we will be able to explore potential developmental patterns in the distribution of the different pronominal realizations, as well as differences in such distribution according to text modality — i.e., spoken vs. written texts. In other words, we seek to determine whether Rigau’s claim about the different values of pronouns holds for the production data of our Catalan students, across age groups and modalities, especially in the ambiguous instances that (semi) spontaneous text production often creates. 3. The processing of pronouns in null subject languages Recently, some researchers have addressed the study of pronominal elements and their preference for certain antecedents. The most influential work is Carminati’s (2002), who proposes a processing account for the distribution of null and overt pronouns in Italian — a null subject language like Catalan — in intra-sentential contexts with two referents. She formulates the ‘Position of Antecedent Hypothesis’ (PAH), according to which a null pronoun prefers an antecedent in a subject position, while an overt pronoun prefers an antecedent in a position other than subject. The following examples from Carminati (2002) show how the two types of pronouns differ in their roles: (4) Marta scriveva frequentemente a Piera quando ___ / lei era negli Stati Uniti. Martha wrote frequently to Piera when ___ / she was in the United States. a. quando Marta era negli Stati Uniti when Marta was in the United States b. quando Piera era negli Stati Uniti when Piera was in the United States


Carminati uses an experimental design that includes questionnaires with series of speech with two sentences per unit. There are two potential antecedents for the pronouns (null and overt), followed by a question on the interpretation of the null and the overt pronouns. This way she shows that Italian speakers are more likely to resolve the null pronoun (___) when referring to the subject (4a) and the overt one (lei) when referring to the object (4b). The preference that pronouns show in the choice of their antecedents is based on a scale of structural prominence. Structural prominence implies that an argument, such as a subject, is an element that occupies a high position in the tree structure, and that is therefore salient and accessible for reference; this is particularly true in the case of preverbal subjects. Carminati stipulates that null pronouns prefer the most prominent antecedent — i.e., an antecedent in subject position — while overt pronouns prefer the less prominent one — i.e., in a lower syntactic position, like the object. This generalization holds particularly for gender-ambiguous contexts as the one in (4); in contrast, when gender is clear, speakers seem to be more flexible, accepting different antecedent positions for overt pronouns. The violation of the PAH does not generate an ungrammatical sequence, but only some kind of inadequacy. On this basis, Carminati suggests that the PAH is a principle that belongs to the processing level rather than to syntax, and that speakers resort to it as to avoid misinterpretation. The aim of our research is to discuss whether Carminati’s hypothesis also holds for another null subject language, Catalan, in intra-sentential as well as in inter-sentential anaphora (discourse level). Furthermore, we want to test the PAH (1) in a different methodological setting: semi-spontaneous text production; (2) in two modalities of text production: spoken and written; and (3) in a specific discourse genre: narratives. Narrative texts seem the ideal choice to test this hypothesis, since they provide numerous opportunities for anaphoric expressions to occur: once the participants of the narrative have been introduced, they are usually reintroduced by the various pronominal forms available in the language (Strömqvist & Verhoeven 2004; Berman 2008). As far as the development of anaphoric resolution is concerned, Hickmann (2004) and Nippold (2004), among others, have observed that the means for expressing reference increase with age and that, crucially, some linguistic resources of narrative development occur in late childhood (12 to 15 years of age). This seems to be the case for anaphoric elements (pronouns and nominal phrases) used to achieve discourse cohesion. From a processing perspective, studies examining children’s online interpretation of anaphoric expressions have argued that children differ from adults. Sekerina et al. (2004), who analyzed performance on a looking measure, have shown that 4 to 7 year olds are less likely to choose sentence-external antecedents for ambiguous pronouns, thus indicating that they


may have problems integrating certain types of contextual or ‘top-down’ information during parsing. From the production perspective, Millogo (2005), who examined written narrative production in 7 to 12 year old French children, shows that memory constraints associated with the accessibility of the memory-trace of the referent have an effect when the discourse topic is maintained. He concludes that the discourse management of personal pronouns is not totally mastered at 11;0, because children cannot effectively integrate the whole array of constraints involved in anaphoric organization. 3.1 Previous research on pronominal antecedent preferences in null subject languages Adopting Carminati’s approach, Alonso-Ovalle et al. (2002) investigated pronouns in intra-sentential as well as in inter-sentential anaphora in Spanish. They predicted that, while the null pronouns would prefer a subject antecedent, the overt pronouns would not. They replicated Carminati’s original design. The following is an example of inter-sentential discourse: (5) a. b.

Juan pegó a Pedro. ___ Está enfadado. Juan hit Pedro. ___ is angry. Juan pegó a Pedro. Él está enfadado. Juan hit Pedro. He is angry.

Their results show that, in contexts as the one in (a), in 73.2% of the time the null pronoun (___) is linked to the subject (which is syntactically more prominent than the object), while in examples such as (b) the overt pronoun Él is almost equally assigned to either Juan or Pedro (50.2% of the total cases were linked to the subject). These results seem to support the idea that, similarly to Italian, in Spanish, null pronouns prefer a subject position as their antecedent, whereas overt pronouns do not prefer a specific antecedent, in contrast with Carminati’s findings. As far as the position of the overt pronoun is concerned, Alonso-Ovalle et al. (2002) also report evidence confirming that, in Spanish, an overt preverbal pronoun is more likely to refer back to a prominent antecedent (i.e., subject), thus superseding overt pronoun neutrality in this respect: (6) a. b.

Pedro piensa que está cansado él. Pedro thinks that is tired he. Pedro piensa que él está cansado. Pedro thinks that he is tired.


In (6) above, Pedro is the preferred antecedent of the pronoun él in the topic continuity sentence (b), while this is not so in the contrastive sentence (a). Of course, in (6) the antecedent of él could also be outside the sentence. In a picture verification task, Sorace and Filiaci (2006) studied the resolution of null and overt pronominal anaphora with near-native and native speakers of Italian. They found a different pattern of behavior for both pronoun types in forward and backward anaphora. In forward anaphora sentences, the subordinate clause follows the main clause. Results for the native speakers showed that null pronoun preferences are equally divided between subject and object, in contrast with Carminati’s findings, while overt pronouns reveal an object-over-subject primacy, here in accordance with Carminati’s results. In the null pronoun version of the sentence in (7), the person wearing the coat may be either the mother or the daughter, whereas when the overt pronoun is used the one wearing the coat is more likely to be the daughter: (7) La mamma dá un bacio alla filgia mentre lei / ___ si mette il capoto. The mother gives a kiss to the daughter while she / ___ puts on the coat.

In backward-anaphora sentences — i.e. when the subordinate clause precedes the main clause — null pronouns prefer subject antecedents; however, a strong preference towards an extralinguistic antecedent is found in the case of overt pronouns. In (8) the most plausible antecedent for the null pronoun is the mother, whereas in the case of the overt pronoun, native speakers significantly prefered an extralinguistic antecedent over the object — the daughter — and the subject — the mother. (8) Mentre lei / ___ si mette il capoto la mamma dá un bacio alla figlia. While she / ___ puts on the coat the mother gives a kiss to the daughter.

As Sorace and Filiaci (2006) assert, this choice is unexpected and it is not obvious why the extralinguistic referent is more suitable than the object. More recently, Mayol and Clark (2010) conducted a set of experiments in order to discover if the PAH can account for pronominal anaphora in Catalan. The authors replicated Carminati’s design, so the results can be compared. The research comprises two experiments: experiment 1 is a questionnaire study, and experiment 2 is a self-paced reading study. Nevertheless, since their goal is to study pronominal anaphora at discourse level, Mayol and Clark (2010) include intersentential sentences in their experiments: (9) a. b.

La Marta escrivia sovint a la Raquel. ___ Vivia als Estats Units. Marta wrote frequently to Raquel. ___ lived in the United States. La Marta escrivia sovint a la Raquel. Ella vivia als Estats Units. Marta wrote frequently to Raquel. She lived in the United States.


Similarly to Carminati’s study, in experiment 1 the speakers had to choose their preferred interpretation by selecting a paraphrase after reading each two-sentence discourse. In the self-paced reading experiment, the subjects were asked to press the space bar after reading each sentence on a computer screen, and the reading time for each sentence was measured. All in all, the results of the two experiments carried out with Catalan speakers show that the PAH holds for inter-sentential discourse in Catalan, since null pronouns tend to refer to antecedents in subject position, while overt pronouns tend to refer to antecedents in non-subject position. These results accord better with Carminati’s results for Italian than with the results for Spanish; moreover, there are some intriguing differences regarding the interpretative properties of overt pronouns in Italian and Catalan, on the one hand, and in Spanish, on the other: overt pronouns were interpreted to refer to non-subject antecedents in 83.3% of the cases in Italian, in 64.5% in Catalan, and in 49.8% in Spanish. Taken together, the above studies seem to indicate that, while null pronouns show a clear preference towards antecedents in subject position, overt pronouns do not show a clear bias. This asymmetry suggests that variation in the processing and interpretation of null and — to some extent — of overt pronouns might be linked to the specific properties of the null subject language at issue and to the type of discourse under inspection. 3.2 Our study: open questions and hypotheses Up to now, we have seen that in a variety of null subject languages different anaphoric expressions have different preferences regarding their antecedents and, specifically, that the syntactic function of the antecedent of pronominal elements matters. This is particularly true in the case of null pronouns, which usually refer to antecedents in subject position, while overt pronouns show a less clear pattern. These findings generally derive from experimental data. On the other hand, there are some language-specific principles involved in the choice of a pronominal expression in discourse: in Catalan, null pronouns are the first choice in cases of topic continuity or maintenance, while overt pronouns are generally used to express a topic shift. These observations indicate that, in addition to syntactic or structural factors, there are discourse constraints which are relevant in the choice of anaphoric pronouns. Our research questions are the following: a. Do null and overt pronouns have the same function and express the same meaning? Or, conversely, are they specialized in some way?


b. Do null pronouns have a preference to refer to subject antecedents and overt pronouns to non-subject antecedents? The observations above refer to the intra-sentential level, but we want to extend our inquiry to broader discourse contexts: c. Do null and overt pronouns have complementary tendencies in choosing their antecedents in intra-sentential and, additionally, in inter-sentential anaphora? In other words, are these preferences maintained at inter-sentential and discourse level? Our working hypotheses are mainly two, the first one derived from the research by Carminati (10), and the second one from Rigau’s study about the role of pronouns in the distribution of information structure in Catalan (11): (10) Position Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH): Null pronouns prefer the most prominent antecedent (the subject), whereas overt pronouns prefer the less prominent one (a lower syntactic position: object, etc.). (11) Discourse Hypothesis (DH): A null pronoun in subject position tends to express a discourse topic that has been introduced or mentioned in the previous sentence. Complementarily, an overt pronoun in subject position tends to reintroduce a discourse topic or, which is the same, to change the topic of the previous sentence.

The studies conducted so far that tested the PAH were based on experimental data. The present study aims at checking whether the hypotheses in (10) and (11) also hold for naturalistic text production in Catalan. A key aspect of the present paper is to provide comparative written and spoken data in order to ascertain the role of modality, in terms of the differing processing demands that each modality imposes and, as a result, the amount and range of ambiguity they generate, as well as the extent to which pronouns contribute to solve it. That is to say, we expect to find more ambiguous uses of both null and overt pronouns in the spoken rather than in the written modality, with null pronouns leading to more ambiguity than overt realizations in both modalities. Finally, in the domain under scrutiny there is lack of developmental data. For this reason, we compared three different age groups: 9–10 year olds (roughly corresponding to Years 5 and 6 of primary school), 12–13 year olds (Years 8 and 9 of secondary school), and 15–16 year olds (Years 11 and 12 of secondary school). Taking the oldest subgroup as reference for comparison, we target at establishing from what age an adult-like distribution of pronominal realizations — in terms of their choice of an antecedent and context appropriateness — can be attested.


4. Method The texts analyzed for the present paper belong to a corpus that was obtained following the methodology and procedures of the international project Developing Literacy in Different Contexts and Different Languages (Berman 2008: 738). The main aim of the project was to study the linguistic resources employed by speakers/writers when talking about and writing a personal narrative as compared to those they used in discussing a topic in speech and in writing. It is a large corpus of semi-spontaneous productions by subjects divided into four age groups: 9–10 years old; 12–13 years old; 15–16 years old, and adults. The texts were obtained using identical elicitation procedures. Subjects were shown a three-minute film without words showing scenes of interpersonal conflicts at school, and they were asked to tell a similar story that had happened to them, both orally and in writing (narrative texts). In addition, they were prompted to discuss the topic of the documentary, again orally and in writing (expository texts). The texts were produced in two sessions and the order of the tasks was counterbalanced. The project was carried out in different languages: English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, and Catalan. As for the Catalan corpus, the sociolinguistic environment where the texts were produced is a bilingual Catalan-Spanish context. We recruited participants who had Catalan as their family language and had acquired Spanish as an L2 in a social and educational context. Certainly, all participants were Catalan/Spanish bilinguals, since this is the most common situation for Catalan-speaking people. They also had some knowledge of English as a foreign language learned at school. We present here a subset of the Catalan narrative texts — both oral and written — produced by 30 subjects of the first three age groups. The distribution and characteristics of the subjects is shown in Table 1. Since each student produced a spoken and a written text, the total number of texts analyzed was 60. As the subjects were asked to refer to the topic of interpersonal conflict, reference is expected to be organized around the narrator as protagonist. This implies a preponderance of first-person references in narratives. Nevertheless, more participants take part in most of the stories reported. In addition, some subjects reported events in which they had not been personally involved, leading to a relatively abundant use of third-person referents. All in all, the number of third-person subject positions attested was considerable, as shown in Table 3 below. The data were transcribed orthographically in CHAT format (MacWhinney 2000). Each main tier contained one clause. Contextual notes were included where appropriate to provide extra-linguistic information useful in the identification of relevant pragmatic and discourse conditions.


Table 1. Participants 9 year olds

12 year olds

15 year olds

female

6

7

5

male

4

3

5

N

10

10

10

The data were also coded for parts of speech (Longer-units), following the Spencer Project protocol. We marked Clause Packages or Longer-units (LU), which are defined as text units that link syntactically defined clauses to the thematic, topic-based notion of discourse constituents, such as scene or episode, in narratives (see Aparici et al. 2000; Berman 2008). The complete analysis of LUs is not the aim of the present study, but we will make some reference to this discoursebased approach to aid us in the interpretation of our findings. In particular, we will refer to the possibility that LUs might act as ‘islands’ for an anaphoric expression to refer to an antecedent. 4.1 Coding criteria We coded all third-person subjects, except for those with an impersonal or generic reading, including universal quantifiers (e.g., tots, ‘all/everybody’, etc.). Relativeclause subjects were also excluded. The remaining referential expressions were classified according to the following criteria:

Table 2. Coding criteria Morphosyntactic form

NP noun phrase OV overt subject pronoun NU null subject pronoun

Discourse function

RI referent introduction RR referent re-introduction RM referent maintenance

Syntactic function of the antecedent

S subject O object I indirect object Z other NA no antecedent

Access to the antecedent

CA clear antecedent AA ambiguous antecedent NA no antecedent


An example of coding is shown below: 1) * SUB:

La nena estava a la porta de classe. The girl was next.to the door of (the) classroom. NP / RI / Z / NA

2) * SUB:

Al cap d’una estona, ____ va caure. After a while (she) fell down. NU / RM / S / CA

3) * SUB:

perquè uns nens grans li van donar una empenta. because some boys older pushed her. NP / RI / Z / NA

4) * SUB:

La seva germana els va veure. Her sister saw them. NP / RI / Z / NA

5) * SUB

i ____ els va perseguir. and went.after them. NU / RM / S / CA

6) * SUB:

però ells ja havien desaparegut. but they had already disappeared. OV / RR / S / CA

Each referent was marked for morphosyntactic form, discourse function, syntactic function of the antecedent, and access to the antecedent. In this passage, the first sentence introduces (RI = referent introduction) a participant, realized by the noun phrase (NP) La nena. In the second sentence, the same referent is repeated (RM = referent maintenance) by means of a null pronoun (NU), whose antecedent is not ambiguous (CA = clear antecedent) and occupies a subject position (S). The next two clauses, 3 and 4, introduce (RI) two new referents: the NP uns nens grans and the NP La seva germana. In clause 5, the subject position is expressed by a null pronoun (NU) that maintains the last referent (La seva germana) and is interpreted as referring to the subject (S) of the previous clause, thus having a clear antecedent (CA). Finally, the last subject in clause 6 is occupied by an overt pronoun (OV), ells, that favors a shift in reference, thus reintroducing (RR) a clear referent (CA), uns nens grans, as its plural agreement properties visibly indicate that has been previously presented in the subject position (S) of clause 3. If a subject had an antecedent in a position other than subject, direct object, or indirect object, it was coded as (Z), ‘other antecedents’. Given that NPs are, by definition, not linked to antecedents, they were coded as NA (no antecedent).


5. Results Table 3 shows the general composition of the subsample of texts in which we analyzed each third-person subject position. Most of the realizations in such position were null pronouns, which ranged from 59% to 74% of all analyzed subjects in the spoken modality, and from 55% to 65% in the written modality. Conversely, written texts tended to have a higher proportion of NPs than the spoken texts: the presence of full NPs ranged from 17% to 27% in the spoken texts, while engaging almost 40% of third-person subjects in the written texts of the oldest age group. There were no significant differences in the distribution of the different types of realizations as a function of age: the general distribution is quite stable from the youngest age group. The number of overt-pronoun realizations was particularly low in the texts analyzed, with null-pronoun and full-NP realizations taking as much as 94% of all possible realizations in some cases. A One-way ANOVA reported no differences as a function of age in the distribution of the different realization types. We also assessed modality — i.e., spoken vs. written texts — differences in a Repeated Measures ANOVA, which did not reveal any significant contrasts. For this reason, subsequent analyses considered all age groups and text types together. 5.1 Syntactic function of the antecedent Table 4 shows the distribution of each category’s choices of an antecedent in terms of its syntactic function. NPs have, by definition, no antecedent, so we only show the distribution of antecedent choices for null and overt pronouns. Null pronouns display an overwhelming preference for antecedents in subject position over any of the other syntactic functions (Figure 1 below). A Repeated Measures ANOVA revealed that the effect is significant, F(1, 29) = 8.42, p = .007. This trend was slightly less marked in the written texts, though it was still remarkably clear (Table 5). Overt pronouns also seemed to prefer subject antecedents, but the difference between subject against all non-subject antecedents was not significant (Figure 1). Their preference for subject antecedents was significant when compared to object antecedents, F(1, 18) = 10.99, p = .004; and to ‘other’ antecedents — i.e., Table 3. Distribution of third-person subject position realizations Spoken narratives

Written narratives

N

NP

Overt

Null

N

NP

Overt

Null

15 year olds

246

17.07%

5.28%

74.39%

130

26.15%

6.92%

65.38%

12 year olds

124

25.81%

6.45%

61.29%

66

27.27%

12.12%

56.06%

9 year olds

107

27.10%

10.28%

58.88%

79

39.24%

5.06%

55.70%


Table 4. Distribution of antecedent choices for each pronominal category. All subjects & modalities (mean proportion and standard deviation) Syntactic function of antecedent (all subjects & modalities) Subject antecedent Object antecedent

Indirect object antecedent

Other antecedent

Overt

48.33 (39.71)

8.77 (19.34)

34.39 (36.12)

7.19 (15.16)

Null

65.46 (29.19)

4.25 (6.13)

18.37 (26.47)

10.59 (19.60)

Table 5. Distribution of antecedent choices for each nominal category by age group and text type (mean proportion and standard deviation) Syntactic function of antecedent Subject antecedent

Object antecedent

Indirect object antecedent

Other antecedent

15 year olds

spoken

written

spoken

written

spoken

written

spoken

written

NP

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

Overt Pronoun

47.78 (47.22)

73.33 0.00 (36–51) (0.00)

13.33 (18.26)

48.89 (45.54)

6.67 (14.91)

3.33 (8.16)

40.00 (89.44)

Null Pronoun

72.12 (28.76)

74.55 (13.50)

3.31 (45.00)

6.10 (8.16)

17.18 (30.40)

7.93 (9.76)

5.96 (8.92)

11.43 (15.19)

12 year olds

spoken

written

spoken

written

spoken

written

spoken

written

NP

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

Overt Pronoun

33.33 (47.14)

13.33 (29.81)

0.00 (0.00)

20.00 (44.72)

58.33 (50.00)

40.00 (54.77)

8.33 (16.67)

26.67 (43.46)

Null Pronoun

62.16 (35.66)

52.81 (38.20)

5.84 (10.57)

9.36 (13.93)

27.37 (34.07)

32.20 (36.09)

4.62 (1044)

5.62 (10.50)

9 year olds

spoken

written

spoken

written

spoken

written

spoken

written

NP

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

NA

Overt Pronoun

41.67 (39.09)

25.00 (35.35)

16.67 (40.82)

25.00 (35.35)

33.33 (42.16

50.00 (0.00)

8.33 (20.41)

0.00 (0.00)

Null Pronoun

74.93 (19.28)

58.70 (33.35)

2.92 (6.03)

3.70 (11.11)

7.36 (10.27)

18.33 (22.91)

14.79 (18.37)

15.56 (34.32)

Pronouns’ choice antecedent. 250 Figure Aurora 1: Bel, Joan Perera andof Naymé Salas All subjects and modalities

*

70 60 50 40

Subject ant. 30

Non-subj. ant.

20 10 48,33

0

51,67 Overt

65,46

34,54 Null

Figure 1. Pronouns’ choice of antecedent. All subjects and modalities

antecedents occupying a position different from subject, direct or indirect object —, F(1, 18) = 18.00,ofp