| Popis: |
In this paper, we offer a prosodic account to supplement some well-known findings relating to choice of antecedents for pronouns in Italian. We argue that methodologies previously used to assess pronoun interpretation are flawed in that they rely only on written language to assess interpretation. In biclausal sentences like (1a), null pronouns are preferred when the antecedent is the discourse topic and subject of a higher clause; otherwise, overt pronouns are preferred. Sorace and Filiaci (2006) and Belletti et al. (2007) report that second language (L2) speakers of Italian overuse overt pronouns in contexts where null pronouns would be appropriate; they attribute this overuse to problems at the syntax-discourse interface (a failure to fully appreciate the discourse requirements on overt pronouns) and/or to processing problems relating to the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS) proposed by Carminati (2002). In addition to the behaviour of the L2ers with respect to overt pronouns, there are some puzzling results in this literature: both native speakers and L2ers fail to perform as expected with null pronouns, allowing them to take object antecedents about 50% of the time. |
