Pragmatic principles in anaphora resolution at the syntax-discourse interface
Cristóbal Lozano · Studies in corpus linguistics · 2016
Previous experimental research has shown that the syntax-discourse interface can be a locus of deficits for learners, even at very advanced levels. In this paper an L2 Spanish corpus is used to investigate Anaphora Resolution (AR) at the syntax-discourse interface (i.e., how null/overt pronouns and NP subjects refer to their antecedents in discourse). A fine-grained tagset was designed to annotate formal, pragmatic and information-status AR factors in a sample of very advanced L1 English – L2 Spanish learners vs. a Spanish native control subcorpus from the CEDEL2 corpus. The corpus analysis results reveal that, though very advanced learners can attain similar patterns to Spanish natives with AR, they show certain deficits: they are pragmatically more redundant than ambiguous. This is explained in terms of a new proposal: the Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis. Results also show that the syntax of topic shift is more complex than previously assumed, with higher rates of NPs than overt pronouns. This can be accounted for by the nature of the antecedent (number of potential antecedents and their gender differences).