an experimental investigation of the antecedent ... · an experimental investigation of the...

An Experimental Investigation of

the Antecedent Preferences of

Hebrew Subject Pronouns

Hamutal Meridor

Master of Science

Cognitive Science and Natural Language Processing

School of Informatics

University of Edinburgh

2006

AbstractA magnitude estimation study was conducted in order to investigate the likelihood of

different pronominal forms in Hebrew to be resolved to different antecedents. Subjects

were presented with sentences such as ”Dana wrote Nina whenφ stayed in the U.S.”

and were asked to rate the likelihood of a following sentence resolving the anaphor, e.g.

”Dana stayed in the U.S.”. The results showed that null and demonstrative pronouns

have a significant preference for subject and object antecedents, respectively, a result

in keeping with previous work (by Carminati, 2002; Bosch et al., 2006, among others).

The overt pronoun exhibited a significant bias only when used in logophors, where

it preferred a subject antecedent over an object one. This stands in contrast to what

Carminati (2002) and Sorace and Filiaci (2006) have found in Italian whereby the

object antecedent was preferred in these cases. The results are discussed in light of

Hebrew’s special pro-drop pattern, alongside the implications of the cross-linguistic

variance attested for.

i

AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the many people who provided great help during the course of my

dissertation, whether professional, technical, inspirational, or other. In particular I

owe a special thank you to Antonella Sorace for devoting both time and thought in

giving me fruitful advice accompanied by genuine enthusiasm. Thank you to all the

people who took the time and effort to participate in my experiment. An infinitely

huge gratitude is devoted to my family - my brothers Mattan, Shaul and Avishai, and

especially my parents Dan & Leora (abba ve’imma), without whom this whole year in

general, and this dissertation in particular, would truly not have been possible. Last but

not least, the biggest thank you of all is granted to my supervisor, Frank Keller, for the

immense amounts of knowledge, understanding, patience, inspiration and kindness he

offered me throughout the whole project. I have no doubt this thesis would not have

taken the form it did if it were not for his superb guidance.

ii

DeclarationI declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is

my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not

been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified.

(Hamutal Meridor)

iii

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Background 3

2.1 The pro-drop phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2.1.1 Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2.1.2 Processing null pronouns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2.2 Null vs. overt pronouns cross-linguistically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2.3 Demonstrative pronouns cross-linguistically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

2.4 Pronouns in Hebrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3 Experiment 18

3.1 Predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

3.2 Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3.2.1 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3.2.2 Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

3.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

3.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

4 Discussion 34

5 Conclusions 37

5.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

5.2 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

A Experimental Material 41

B Descriptive Statistics 49

Bibliography 50

iv

Chapter 1

Introduction

Anaphoric expressions have long been a focus of different language-related research

domains. Linguists have investigated the different constraints on potential antecedents

for anaphora in a variety of means, among them syntactic frameworks such as binding

theory (Chomsky, 1981), semantic-pragmatic frameworks like centering theory (Grosz

et al., 1995) and discourse-related ones as discourse representation theory (Kamp,

1981). Alongside linguists, computational linguists, in their pursuit of reference reso-

lution algorithms of noun phrases in general, have also striven to tackle the problem of

anaphora resolution in particular. Different algorithms explore the effects of syntactic,

semantic and other factors that might affect the antecedent preferences of pronouns

(Hobbs, 1978; Lappin and Leass, 1994). These factors have also been extensively in-

vestigated within the domain of psycholinguistics, where pronouns and anaphora have

indeed been a main research topic (Gernsbacher and Hargreaves, 1988; Cooreman and

Sanford, 1996).

While anaphora resolution appears to have been extensively researched in the separate

realms of linguistics, computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, other phenom-

ena in natural language have not received as much unified attention. Whereas linguists

have long been concerned with the typologically wide spread phenomenon of pronoun

dropping (pro-drop), psycholinguists on the other hand, as they have focused mainly

on English processing, have conducted surprisingly little research on the topic. This is

especially noticeable in light of the great attention the processing of pronouns in gen-

eral has received by psycholinguists. The existence of two separate forms to express

pronouns, both overt as well as covert, has led researchers to believe that they carry

1

Chapter 1. Introduction 2

different roles, whether in grammar or in processing. Despite grammarians’ notable

advances in depicting the anaphoric properties of the null pronouns, they have not been

able to produce a satisfying answer to the puzzling question of their existence in the

first place. Why would a language have two sets of pronominals, null and overt, both

filling the same role?

This project investigates the hypothesis that different types of pronouns have different

preferences in selecting their antecedents. It looks into the possibility that the exis-

tence of null versus overt pronouns can be accounted for by the anaphora resolution

mechanism. The project further tests another class of pronominals, the demonstrative

pronouns, which have a clear bias toward less salient antecedents (Bosch et al., 2003,

2006; Kaiser and Trueswell, 2004, 2005). In order to investigate the referential proper-

ties of the pronouns, the project makes use of the experimental paradigm of magnitude

estimation in judgement experiments, which enables to determine the difficulty in re-

solving anaphora of different forms.

Following this brief introduction, section 2 offers a review of the phenomenon of null

subjects, demonstratives and pronouns in general, alongside a critical review of the

relevant research that has been conducted in the field in other languages. Subsequently,

section 3 presents the experiment conducted under the scope of this dissertation. Then,

section 4 offers an analysis of the data obtained in light of the past research presented

in section 2 and the predictions made in section 4. Section 5 concludes by highlighting

the findings and offering some interesting unresolved issues for future research.

Chapter 2

Background

2.1 The pro-drop phenomenon

2.1.1 Review

Linguists have long been concerned with the typologically widespread phenomenon of

pronoun dropping (pro-drop). Pro-drop languages have two seemingly redundant sets

of pronouns, null and overt, both filling the same role. Thus, the two Hebrew sentences

(2.1 a, b) below carry the same meaning:

(2.1) a. φ axalti tapuax

φ ate1SG apple

b. ani axalti tapuax

I ate 1SG apple

’I ate an apple’

Pronouns may be dropped from different syntactic positions, carrying different gram-

matical roles. Not only the dropping of subjects as this study investigates (e.g. 2.1)

has instigated much theoretical interest, but also that of object pronouns (Cole, 1987;

Huang, 1995; Keller and Lapata, 1998).

Different languages exhibit different variations on pronoun dropping. Whereas lan-

guages such as Italian allow pronoun dropping ubiquitously, languages like English

regularly prohibit it. Traditionally, pronouns are believed to provide lexical informa-

tion that aids in resolving anaphora. Therefore, it seems reasonable that languages

3

Chapter 2. Background 4

as Italian, in which verbs carry marked agreement features that render the pronouns

superfluous, may drop the pronouns’ overt form. Jaeggli and Safir (1989) noted that

null subjects may be found either in languages in which the agreement morphology

is indeed sufficient without the overt subject, as well as in languages which have no

agreement or person feature at all. Chinese, for instance, has but a number feature

indicated by its pronouns in spoken language and allows a far greater null pronoun

distribution (Huang, 2000) than languages such as Italian and Spanish which do have

agreement features marked on their verbs. Hebrew, a special kind of pro-drop lan-

guage, lies somewhere between those two extremes as it generally allows null subjects

only in 1st and 2nd persons, in the past and future tenses. Furthermore, Hebrew has a

relatively free word order and allows both the canonical SVO1 order as well as VSO

and other less frequent constructions.

2.1.2 Processing null pronouns

Carminati (2002) points to two possible hypotheses one might conjecture in trying

to understand the reasoning underlying the existence of the two separate pronomi-

nal forms. First, since null subjects usually carry information regarding person and

number, but not gender2, one might speculate that there exists a preference to use the

overt subject in order to avoid ambiguity in a context with two gender-differentiated

referents. In other words, when an overt pronoun may disambiguate the reference, it

seems reasonable that it would be preferred over a null pronoun which maintains the

ambiguity. The second, somewhat contradictory, possible hypothesis Carminati brings

forward is one found on the general principal of economy of processing. This account

predicts that the use of the null form might be preferred as it is more economical both

in size and in the content it carries (less features).

Albeit the seeming plausibility of these hypotheses, Carminati’s findings render both

insufficient in explaining the perplexing phenomena of the processing of null and overt

subjects in intra-sentential anaphora in Italian. She proposes and provides evidence for

a processing hypothesis to account for the phenomenon, stipulating that the pronouns

1Although most linguistic theories follow the tradition of Greenberg (1966) in stipulating ModernHebrew word order to follow that of Biblical Hebrew and be underlying VSO, on the surface it iscommonly SVO, which is the crucial factor for the inherently serial processing task.

2This is true mainly in Romance languages but not Semitic languages, including Hebrew, whereseparate inflictions exist for the two genders


differ from each other in having distinct biases for antecedents. Her hypothesis, the

Position of Antecedent Hypothesis, states the following:

The Position of Antecedent Hypothesis for the Italian null and overt pro-nouns in intra-sentential anaphora: the null pronoun prefers an antecedentwhich is in the Spec IP position, while the overt pronoun prefers an an-tecedent which is not in the Spec IP position. (p. 33).

Carminati finds her hypothesis on the notion that pronouns have preferences for an-

tecedents based on a scale of prominence. She stipulates that null pronouns prefer the

most prominent antecedent, while their overt counterparts prefer the less prominent

one, if such is available. In particular, Carminati claims the prominence scale is one

of structural, syntactic, nature and that the [SPEC, IP] position (Chomsky, 1981) is the

most prominent one in the syntactic structure of the sentence. Hence, she claims the

null pronoun in Italian intra-sentential anaphora will prefer to take the argument in the

[SPEC, IP] position as an antecedent. It seems that Carminati’s strong commitment

to a specific syntactic framework (that offered by Chomsky and followers) might be a

rather binding approach theoretically.

2.2 Null vs. overt pronouns cross-linguistically

Null Pronouns in Italian

While linguists have tried to account for pro-drop by syntactic, lexical, discourse-

related and other means, psycholinguists have conducted surprisingly little research

on the topic. Rather, most psycholinguistic research has focused on the processing of

overt pronouns. Arnold et al. (2000), for instance, used an eye-tracking study to show

that gender information and accessibility influence the initial processing of overt pro-

nouns in English. Carminati (2002) provides evidence from Italian for her hypothesis

by which the existence of null pronouns derives from a division of labour between the

two pronominal forms with respect to anaphora resolution. She used self-paced read-

ing questionnaire studies to show that null and overt pronouns in Italian intra-sentential

anaphora have complementary biases in choosing their antecedents, as shown in (2.2):

(2.2) Marta scriveva frequentemente a Piera quandoφ/lei era negli Stati Uniti

’Martha wrote frequently to Piera whenφ/she was in the U.S.’


a. Quando Marta era negli Stati Uniti

’When Marta was in the States’

b. Quando Piera era negli Stati Uniti

’When Piera was in the States’

Carminati demonstrated that people are more likely to resolve the null pronoun as re-

ferring to the subject and the overt ones as referring to the object in her questionnaires.

In (2.2) above this preference translates into different interpretations of who was the

person that was in the U.S. according to the use of the different pronouns. When the

pronoun is absent (null pronoun), Martha is gathered to have been in the U.S. (par-

ticipants chose option a), whereas when the overt pronoun is used Piera is the one

understood to have been there (option b).

In addition to this same-gender case, Carminati also shows that the gender information

carried by the overt pronoun does not render it preferable on its covert counterpart even

in a gender-ambiguous context. This suggests that not only is the human processor

affected by the form of the pronoun, but that processing might also account for the

nature of the distribution of pronouns, alongside other linguistic factors.

Sorace and Filiaci (2006) have studied the resolution of null and overt pronominal

anaphora in near-native and native speakers of Italian. Their results provide more fine-

grained observations as to the nature of the different pronouns’ preferences. Specifi-

cally, they provide evidence for differences between forward (anaphor) and backward

(logophor) anaphora with respect to the processing of pronouns. In processing terms,

there exists an important difference between the two types of anaphors in that in for-

ward anaphora, where the main clause precedes the subordinate clause, the proces-

sor encounters both potential antecedents before having encountered the pronoun. In

backward anaphora on the other hand, where the subordinate clause precedes the main

one, the processor first encounters the pronoun and does not encounter either of the

potential antecedents until after having encountered their assignment. As Sorace and

Filiaci note, this type of anaphora poses certain requirements for the processor that are

of particular interest. Since the pronoun linearly precedes its potential antecedents,

there are no prior discourse constraints that are imposed on the resolution in advance.

Research on logophoric anaphora resolution in English has shown that the processor

tries to resolve the pronoun with the closest possible antecedent, even in the absence

of bottom-up information (Cowart and Cairns, 1987; Kazanina, 2005; Kazanina et al.,


2005). Furthermore, there seems to be a particular expectation by the English proces-

sor to resolve the backward anaphoric dependency in the matrix subject position (van

Gompel and Liversedge, 2003).

In Italian, Sorace and Filiaci found a different pattern of behaviour for both type of

pronouns in the two anaphor forms. They used a picture verification task in which

the participants were asked to indicate the picture corresponding to the meaning of the

subordinate clause which resolves the anaphor, thus identifying the antecedent for the

pronoun. For null pronouns, they found that while in backward anaphora there is a

clear overwhelming preference for subject antecedents as Carminati had found, this

preference does not exist in forward anaphora. In the latter sentences, preferences of

the native speakers were equally divided between the subject and the complement of

the matrix clause. Thus, in (2.3) below, when the null pronoun is used, in (a) the one

wearing the coat is more likely to be the mother while in (b) it is as likely to be the

mother as it is the daughter.

(2.3) a. Mentre lei/φ si mette il capoto la mamma da un bacio

while she/φ wears the coat the mother gives a kiss

alla filgia

to the daughter

’While she/φ is wearing her coat, the mother kisses her daughter.’

b. La mamma da un bacio alla filgia mentre lei/φthe mother gives a kiss to the daughter while she/φsi mette il capoto

wears the coat

’The mother kisses her daughter, while she/φ is wearing her coat.’

In the overt pronoun case, Sorace and Filiaci also found different preferences for the

anaphor and logophor cases. In forward anaphora cases, native speakers significantly

preferred the complement over the subject and extralinguistic referent. In (2.3b) above,

that translates to preferringlei to refer to the daughter rather than the mother. In the

backward anaphora case however, a strong preference toward an extralinguistic an-

tecedent was found, followed by the complement as a distant second possibility, and

the subject as an even less likely one. Hence, in (2.3a) above, people are more likely to

understandlei as referring to an extralinguistic antecedent, then the daughter, and very


infrequently the mother. As Sorace and Filiaci note, it is quite surprising and not clear

why the extralinguistic antecedent is so acceptable in this context that it supersedes the

complement antecedent.

Null Pronouns in Spanish

Evidence for a division of labour between null and overt pronouns in anaphora resolu-

tion exist in other Romance languages as well. Alonso-Ovalle et al. (2002) investigated

the anaphoric behaviour of pronouns in Spanish, both in intra-sentential as well as in

inter-sentential anaphora. They used written questionnaires to show that the null pro-

noun in Spanish prefers a subject antecedent, while the overt pronoun does not. In ex-

ample (2.4a) participants tended to assign Juan, which is the subject, as an antecedent

of the null pronoun in the majority of the trials, while in (2.4b)El was assigned either

Juan or Pedro equally. This stands in contrast to Carminati’s findings in Italian by

which the overt pronoun is more likely to be linked to the less salient antecedent.

(2.4) a. Juan pego a Pedro. φ Esta enfadado

Juan hit Pedro. φ is angry

b. Juan pego a Pedro. El Esta enfadado

Juan hit Pedro. He is angry

’Juan hit Pedro. He is angry’

A possible methodological issue Alonso-Ovalle et al. have not considered and might

be influencing their results lies in their choice of experimental material. Most of the

sentences they used feature statives in the second, anaphor resolving, sentence (e.g.

’He is angry.’). This may have a potential effect on the antecedent preferences. It

might be argued, for example, that statives are less inclined to a topic shift than verbs

and are therefore more likely to be resolved by the more salient antecedent, the subject

(this might provide an explanation as to why no preference toward object antecedents

was found for the overt pronouns in this study).

Furthermore, some of Alonso-Ovalle et al.’s lexical choices do not intuitively seem

pragmatically neutral, such as sentence (2.5) below.

(2.5) Maite entretuvo a Elena.Φ/Ella esta cansada.

’Maite entertained Elena. She is tired.’

In fact, in the absence of pre-testing of the stimuli, it is rather hard to determine whether

the bias Alonso-Ovalle et al. report stems from the pronouns themselves or is it rather


an artefact of the experimental material chosen.

Aside from extending the validity of Carminati’s theory regarding null subjects to

Spanish, Alonso-Ovalle et al. (2002) also present evidence suggesting that the topic-

focus articulation of the sentence containing a pronoun affects the pronouns’ general

anaphoric preferences. Specifically, they show that when an overt pronoun is a pre-

verbal subject3 it is more likely that the pronoun refers to prominent antecedents (sub-

jects), thus overriding the overt pronoun’s normal neutrality with respect to its an-

tecedent. In (2.6), the pronominal subject of the embedded sentence can either have

Pedro as an antecedent, or have an obviative reading (a reading in which the antecedent

for the pronoun is found outwith the sentence).

(2.6) a. Pedro piensa que esta cansado el

Pedro thinks that is tired he

b. Pedro piensa queel esta cansado

Pedro thinks that he is tired

’Pedro thinks that he is tired’

After having established that the syntactic position dictates topicality, Alonso-Ovalle

et al. turned to testing whether the properties of the null pronoun also stem from

its syntactic position, the preverbal subject position. By manipulating the position of

the pronoun and thus its topicality (or lack of), they predict and ascertain that Pedro

is chosen as an antecedent more frequently in the topical (2.6b) than the non-topical

(2.6a). Alonso-Ovalle et al. deem this finding as implying that the preferences of the

pronouns in fact result from a wider principle of the interpretation associated with the

special syntactic position the null pronouns typically occupy rather than the lexical or

semantic properties of the pronouns themselves.

Null Pronouns in Romanian

Another Romance language in which evidence of different pronoun forms affect the

preference for their antecedents is Romanian. Diaconescu and Goodluck (2004) stud-

ied the d(iscourse)-linked attraction effect in Romanian, another Romance pro-drop

language. A d-linked wh-phrase is a phrase such aswhich boy, while a non d-linked

phrase is a phrase such aswho. The d-linked effect, first introduced by Frazier and

Clifton (2002) in English sentences, stipulates that d-linked and non d-linked phrases

3Alonso-Ovalle et al. (2002) separately show the preverbal subject is interpreted as a topic in Span-ish.


have different biases in choosing their pronoun antecedents. Frazier and Clifton point

out that d-linked phrases imply the existence of a set of contextually determined enti-

ties from which the speaker chooses. For instance, when introducingwhich boy, the

speaker refers back to a set of already contextually existent boys. Non d-linked phrases

such aswho, on the other hand, carry no such implication. Frazier and Clifton showed

that d-linked phrases like (2.7b) are more likely to attract the reference of a pronoun in

a subordinate clause than non d-linked phrases such as (2.7a).

(2.7) a. Rick knew who Janice sang a song to before he went to sleep.

b. Rick knew which brother Janice sang a song to before he went to sleep.

Diaconescu and Goodluck were able to replicate the pronoun attraction effect Frazier

and Clifton had found in English for both null and overt subjects in Romanian by

using a similar questionnaire type experiment the latter have used. In direct questions,

subjects attached both types of pronouns to the wh-phrase more often when it was a

d-linked phrase than when it was not. For instance, in (2.8) below,φ andhe chose

which brotheras an antecedent more frequently thanwho.

(2.8) Cui/carui baiat I -a trimis Barbu o pusca atunci candφ/el a fost amenintat?

’Who/Which guy did Barbu send a rifle to whenφ/he was threatened?’

The prediction that the overt pronoun might carry a stronger effect due its being a

focused element was not confirmed. In fact, it was an unpredicted result of their ex-

periment that has come to provide evidence relevant to our study. The null subject had

a higher proportion of co-reference with the wh-phrase than its overt counterpart did.

This is exactly as Carminati and Alonso-Ovalle et al. would have it, the null pronoun

being more likely to be linked to the most prominent element.

Importantly, a different kind of experimental sentence did not strictly follow the syntactically-

driven model offered by Carminati (2002). In embedded question sentences such as

(2.9), Carminati would wrongly predict the null pronouns to refer to the main clause

subject Barbu, whereas they were found to actually refer to the wh-phrase.

(2.9) Radu a stiut cui/carui frate i -a cantat Ioana un cantecinainte caφ/el sa se fi

dus la culcare

’Radu knew who/which brother Ioana sang a song to beforeφ/he went to

sleep’


Diaconescu and Goodluck offer an explanation to this exception in that the search for

an antecedent for the null pronoun might be restricted within its clausal domain. They

suggest that since the only possible antecedent in the immediate domain is not a good

candidate for reference of the overt pronoun, a search for its antecedent may proceed

upwards beyond the domain more rapidly than the search for a null pronoun antecedent

would. As they point out, this account also explains their near-significant finding that

the null pronoun was more inclined to attach to the wh-phrase in the embedded ques-

tions than the non-embedded sentences, since in the former, the wh-phrase is the sole

possible antecedent in the local domain.

Null Pronouns in Chinese

Self-paced reading-time experiments combined with questionnaires conducted by Yang

et al. (1999, 2001) show that the Chinese null pronouns also have a preference as to

their antecedent, although the overt ones do not. Yang et al. followed the prevalent

methodological assumption by which faster reading times indicate greater acceptabil-

ity (e.g. Arnold et al., 2000), and in this case greater likelihood of the antecedent

to refer to the pronoun. Yang et al. studied the use of null and overt pronouns in

extra-sentential anaphora in Chinese, a pro-drop language. As previously pointed out,

unlike the rich morpho-syntactic systems of the Romance languages Chinese belongs

to a different class of languages, such that do not have verb agreement and do not

superfluously encode agreement features thus rendering the overt pronoun redundant.

Therefore, one might expect a different mechanism in the processing of the pronouns

in Chinese.

Yang et al. (1999) used materials such as (2.10), translated into English:

(2.10) Context sentence: Xiaomei (feminine) told Xiaorong (feminine) that veg-

etables, instead of flowers, should be planted in the garden.

Critical Sentence:

Continue Condition: She/φ thought vegetables are of more utility than

flowers.

Shift Condition : She/φ thought, however, that both vegetables and flowers

should be planted.

Final Sentence: The usage and planning of a garden are worth studying.

The critical sentence containing either form of the pronoun was manipulated such that

it was pragmatically disambiguated toward the same-gender subject or object in the


continue and shift conditions, respectively. Yang et al. found that the form of the

pronominal does not interact with the continue/shift conditions. Their findings sug-

gested that in Chinese the null pronoun indeed prefers a subject antecedent, but they

did not find the complementary behaviour for the overt pronoun, as Carminati had

found in Italian. The overt pronoun has no antecedent bias and can equally easily

retrieve subject and object antecedents, much like the Spanish examples.

In a similar experiment, whose results were later replicated (Yang et al., 2001), the

gender of the referents was manipulated so it could be disambiguated by an overt

pronoun, as shown in (2.11):

(2.11) Context sentence: Daxing (masculine) told Xiaorong (feminine) that veg-

etables, instead of flowers, should be planted in the garden.

Critical Sentence:

Continue Condition: He/φ thought vegetables are of more utility than flow-

ers.

Shift Condition : He/φ thought, however, that both vegetables and flowers

should be planted.

In the shift condition, but not in the continue condition, Yang et al. found that the

overt, gender disambiguating, pronoun was read significantly faster than the null pro-

noun, which, in turn, was read significantly faster in the continue condition than in

the shift condition. These findings indicate a preference to provisionally assign the

null pronoun to a subject antecedent and thus the retrieval of the object antecedent is

penalized(in the shift condition). The Chinese overt pronoun, on the other hand, dif-

fers from the Italian one’s behaviour in that it is more flexible in retrieving either kind

of referent. Whereas in Italian Carminati found evidence of overt pronouns assigning

subjects as their antecedents only in gender disambiguated or one-referent contexts but

not in general, the Chinese overt pronoun was found to retrieve subjects also in other

contexts.

Specifically, the overt pronoun showed no special preference as to its antecedent.

Carminati notes that while the connection of the null pronoun with a highly salient ref-

erent might well be a universal feature, the preference of the overt pronoun antecedent

might be a continuum between the two extreme options exemplified by Italian and Chi-

nese. It might therefore be interesting to see whether and where Hebrew, a language

that exhibits distinctively different null pronoun distribution than both these languages,


lies somewhere on that continuum.

2.3 Demonstrative pronouns cross-linguistically

Several recent studies have investigated the distribution of demonstrative pronouns

and their referential properties. Bosch et al. (2003, 2006) used reading time and sen-

tence completion experiments as well as corpus evidence to show that German demon-

stratives have a bias toward non-subject antecedents, such as the following example

demonstrates:

(2.12) Paul wollte mit Peter laufen gehen. Aber er/der war erkaltet.

’Paul wanted to go running with Peter. But he/DEM had a cold.’

The demonstrative pronounder is naturally interpreted to refer to the grammatical

object of the previous sentence,Peter, while the personal pronouner seems to have a

preference to refer to the grammatical subjectPaul.

In their corpus study, Bosch et al. (2003, 2006) investigated the distribution of pro-

nouns and demonstratives within sentences, as well as the distribution of their an-

tecedents in prior sentences. They found a significant difference in use between demon-

strative and personal pronouns. Their findings suggested that the typical use of the

German demonstrative is as a pre-verbal subject referring back to an NP object of the

prior sentences, while the typical use of the German pronoun is as a pre or post-verbal

subject referring back to the NP subject of the prior sentence. Bosch et al. (2006) car-

ried on by conducting self-paced reading-time experiments followed by questionnaires

or completion questions testing the preferences of the demonstrative versus the overt

pronoun. The completion studies repeated the sentence containing the anaphor, leav-

ing a definite article followed by a gap at the position of the pronoun, hence forcing

the subjects to resolve the anaphor with a specific noun phrase of the two potential

antecedents. The questionnaire studies used a comprehension question rather than the

completion sentence, however the form of that question and its possible answers, if at

all, remains vague in their paper. Aside from manipulating the pronouns themselves,

they also manipulated the pragmatic environment in which the sentences were read

based on the intuitive observation that world-knowledge may heavily affect the resolu-

tion of the pronouns, as demonstrated in (2.13):


(2.13) a. Im Krankenhaus.

At the hospital.

b. Der Oberarzt untersucht den Notfallpatienten.

The senior doctor is examining the emergency patient.

c. Er/Der ist namlich Herzspezialist.

He/DEM is a heart specialist.

d. Er/Der muß sofort operiert werden.

He/DEM must be operated on at once.

While in (2.13c) the world-knowledge clearly dictates a preference for the subject an-

tecedent, in (2.13d) the preferred reading is the one where the object is the antecedent.

When using a demonstrative, that is argued to prefer object antecedents, with a reading

that calls for a subject antecedent such as (2.13c), we would expect a difficulty for the

reader. Indeed, Bosch et al. found longer reading times for those conditions where

world knowledge supports the subject of the context sentence. Moreover, in their com-

pletion questionnaires they observed that in these conditions more participants tended

to disregard world knowledge and choose the object when the pronoun was a demon-

strative than when the pronoun was a personal pronoun. However, all the results they

report lack the crucial support of statistical data, rendering them untestable at best, if

not questionable.

The central observation Bosch et al. made was that in those cases where there is a world

knowledge bias for the interpretation of the pronoun, world knowledge is clearly the

dominating factor in pronoun comprehension. In the unbiased neutral cases they found

a clear preference for one interpretation only where the demonstrative pronoun referred

to the context sentence object, suggesting that the demonstrative does indeed carry its

own lexical preference as to its antecedent, unlike the personal pronoun. However, as

Bosch et al. point out it has hard to determine whether this finding does indeed stem

from some special property of the demonstrative correlated with its grammatical func-

tion, or whether it is but a mere side effect. Specifically, the observation which casts

doubt on the idea that the use of demonstrative pronouns is exclusively determined by

the grammatical role of the antecedent is the clear preference of demonstrative pro-

nouns to occur in the pre-verbal position of the sentence Bosch et al. have found in

their corpus study.


The demonstrative preference toward a non-salient antecedent is indeed quite a preva-

lent cross-linguistic finding. Further reenforcing evidence for the referential properties

of demonstrative pronouns come from Kaiser and Trueswell (2004, 2005). They used

completion studies and eye-tracking experiments in order to present evidence that the

choice of a demonstrative over an overt pronoun in Finnish (Kaiser and Trueswell,

2005) and Dutch (Kaiser and Trueswell, 2004) is triggered by the salience of the refer-

ents. Interestingly, they found that this is not the case for the choice of reduced versus

overt pronouns in Dutch4.

2.4 Pronouns in Hebrew

As previously mentioned, Hebrew is a partial pro-drop language as it generally al-

lows null pronouns only in 1st and 2nd persons, in tensed clauses (past and future), as

depicted in Table 2.1, adapted from Hacohen and Schaeffer (2005).

Pronoun Person Past Present Future

ani 1 sg m amarti *omer omar

ani 1 sg f amarti *omeret omar

ata 2 sg m amarta *omer tomar

at 2 sg f amart *omeret tomri

hu 3 sg m *amar *omer *yomar

hi 3 sg f *amra *omeret *tomar

anaxnu 1 pl m amarnu *omrim nomar

anaxnu 1 pl f amarnu *omrot nomar

atem 2 pl m amartem *omrim tomru

aten 2 pl f amarten *omrot tomarna

hem 3 pl m amru *omrim *yomru

hen 3 pl f amru *omrot *tomarna

Table 2.1: Pro-drop distribution

However, although Hebrew generally does not allow pronoun dropping in third person

e.g. (2.14) below, the phenomenon is quite prevalent in certain complex structures and

specifically, in sentences involving subordinate clauses, such as (2.15).

4In the accessibility literature (e.g. Ariel, 1990), reduced pronouns are considered to be higher thannull pronouns and lower than overt ones.


(2.14) *φ telex la-mis’ada

* φ go FUT 3SGF to-restaurant

* ’will go to the restaurant’

(2.15) Dana amra se-φ-telex la-mis’ada

Dana said3SGF that-φ-go FUT 3SGF to-restaurant

’Dana said that she will go to the restaurant’

Third person null subject constructions potentially give rise to different preferences.

Examining the overt form of (2.15), shown in (2.16), we notice thathi might refer

either to Dana or to a different female antecedent, provided that such exists in the

context.

(2.16) Dana amra se-hi telex la-mis’ada

Dana said3SGF that-she goFUT 3SGF to-restaurant

’Dana said that she will go to the restaurant’

While this ambiguity does exist in potential in sentences such as (2.16), as Carminati

pointed out it is much more evident in cases where there exists more than one possible

antecedent within the sentence boundaries, such as (2.17):

(2.17) Dana katva le-nina kse-φ/hi hayta be-skotland

Dana katva3SGF to-Nina when-φ/she was3SGF in-Scotland

’Dana wrote Nina when she was in Scotland’

Both the null as well as the overt pronoun in the relative clause are potentially ambigu-

ous and can refer to either one of the two antecedents Dana and Nina. In Italian, as

Carminati (2002) showed, the null pronoun is more likely to be resolved to the subject,

whereas the overt one is more likely to be resolved to the object. According to this

logic, in (2.17) Dana would be the one understood to be in Scotland when the null

pronoun is used, and Nina the one when the overt pronoun is used.

Carminati further showed that in gender-ambiguous contexts the overt form is less

acceptable than in gender-unambiguous contexts equivalent to (2.17). The main dif-

ference between Italian and Hebrew in this respect is that the Hebrew 3rd person verb

infliction marks the gender of the subject, unlike Italian where both male and female

forms of the verb are identical in 3rd person. Therefore, in Hebrew the gender ambigu-

ous contexts such as (2.18) below will in fact be resolved upon the processing of the


verb, and are therefore predicted to produce results similar to the gender-unambiguous

contexts.

(2.18) Dana katva le-ro’i kse-φ/hi hayta be-skotland

Dana katva3SGF to-Roy when-φ/she was3SGF in-Scotland

’Dana wrote Roy when she was in Scotland’

* ’Dana wrote Royi when shei was in Scotland’

In addition to the null and overt personal pronouns Hebrew makes use of, there also

exists a set of demonstrative pronouns in the language. Replacing the overt pronoun in

(2.17) with a demonstrative will result in a preferred resolution of the pronoun to the

object, as shown in (2.19):

(2.19) Dana katva le-nina kse-zo hayta be-skotland

Dana katva3SGF to-Nina when-sheDEM was3SGF in-Scotland

’Dana wrote Ninai when shei was in Scotland’

This intuitive preference is in keeping with the findings of Bosch et al. (2003, 2006) and

Kaiser and Trueswell (2004, 2005). It suggests that different pronouns might indeed

have different preferences as to their antecedents and specifically, that the demonstra-

tives seem to have a strong preference toward non-subject antecedents.

Chapter 3

Experiment

The experiment aimed at testing the existence of different pronouns’ preferences in

Hebrew in choosing their antecedents. This was investigated by testing the accept-

ability of different pronouns being resolved to subject or (indirect) object antecedents.

Specifically, the experiment elicited magnitude estimation judgements in two-sentence

discourses, where the pronouns - null, overt or demonstrative - were resolved to one of

the two potential antecedents.

3.1 Predictions

Following the research that has been conducted in the area in other languages, however

preliminary it might be, a certain amount of the investigated data was predicted to

adhere to the cross-linguistic trends found.

Demonstrative Pronouns

Bosch et al. (2003, 2006) and Kaiser and Trueswell (2004, 2005) have investigated

the referential properties of demonstrative pronouns in German, Dutch and Finnish,

respectively. The demonstratives in all three languages exhibited similar behaviour in

their preference for less salient antecedents (i.e.: non-subject antecedents).

In Hebrew, demonstrative pronouns have a clear preference toward non-subject an-

tecedent, to the extent of the ungrammaticality of (3.1) below1:

1This sentence is ungrammatical when standing on its own. As a part of a discourse, however, thedemonstrative could potentially be understood as referring to an extra-sentential entity, provided that

18

Chapter 3. Experiment 19

(3.1) *Dana katva le-roi kse-zo hayta be-skotland

Dana wrote3SGF to-Roy when-sheDEM was3SGF in-Scotland

* ’Dana wrote Roy when she was in Scotland’

Since the demonstrative pronounzo is female, it must refer back to a feminine an-

tecedent. The only possible feminine entity in this sentence is Dana, who is in the

subject position. Yet the sentence is ungrammatical, suggesting that the demonstrative

cannot refer back to the subject. The object antecedent in (3.1) is masculine and thus

renders the sentence ungrammatical. When the gender of the object antecedent is in

agreement with the pronoun as in (3.2), where the masculine form of the demonstra-

tive zeis used, the sentence is completely grammatical, suggesting the pronoun indeed

refers to the object.

(3.2) Dana katva le-roi kse-ze haya be-skotland

Dana wrote3SGF to-Roy when-heDEM was3SGM in-Scotland

’Dana wrote Roy when he was in Scotland’

Based on these observations, alongside the cross-linguistic findings presented above,

we would be on safe grounds to expect the demonstrative pronouns in Hebrew as well

to have a strong preference toward object antecedents.

Null Pronouns

As previously shown in section 2, there exists a wide range of cross-linguistic evi-

dence from languages that exhibit distinctively different lexical, syntactic and other

characteristics (e.g. Chinese, Italian) pointing all to the null pronouns’ preference to-

ward subject, more salient, antecedents. In light of these findings, it seems fairly sound

to expect that Hebrew too will adhere to the same behaviour of its null pronouns an-

tecedent preferences. Thus, in sentences such as (3.4), we would expect people to

resolve Dana as the one that was in Scotland.

(3.3) Dana katva le-nina kse-φ hayta be-skotland

Dana katva3SGF to-Nina when-φ was3SGF in-Scotland


However, due to Sorace and Filiaci’s (2006) finding suggesting that this is not in fact

the case in forward anaphora, but only in backward anaphora, we might find a differ-

ence in the antecedent preferences between the different anaphora directions in Hebrew

such is given by the context.


null pronouns as well. Although, even if not indifferent to their antecedent’s grammat-

ical function in the forward anaphora case, we would still not be surprised to find the

null pronouns exhibit a stronger preference effect for subject antecedents in the back-

ward anaphora case.

Overt Pronouns

Unlike the null pronoun case, the evidence in light of a strong preference of the overt

pronoun is hardly as uniform and convincing as that of the null pronoun. Despite

Carminati’s (2002) finding that overt pronouns in Italian resolve to non-subject an-

tecedents, other studies suggest differently. Yang et al. (1999, 2001) found that Chinese

overt pronouns are not biased as to their antecedent altogether and tend to prefer sub-

ject antecedents equally as they do object antecedents. Such is the case with Spanish

overt pronouns as well (Alonso-Ovalle et al., 2002). Therefore, it might seem reason-

able to predict that Hebrew will also show no such preference. However, since there

do seem to be cross-linguistic differences regarding this phenomenon, no prediction

could be soundly made.

Any result regarding the behaviour of the overt pronouns would be plausible, although

different results would carry with them different implications. Should the overt pro-

noun in the forward anaphora case in Hebrew be found to prefer object antecedents,

it would support Carminati’s claim, causing it hold in a wider cross-linguistic setting.

On the other hand, should the overt pronoun reveal no preference as to its antecedent

or if it would reveal a preference toward subject antecedents, it would seem that the

overt pronoun preferences are not as universal as the null pronoun’s ones. In this

case, Carminati’s suggestion of an existence of a cross-linguistic continuum of overt

pronoun preferences along which different languages are situated would seem suit-

able. The latter scenario, where Hebrew overt pronouns prefer subject antecedents in

forward anaphora, will render Italian and Hebrew to reside on both extremes of that

continuum, while Chinese will be located somewhere in the middle between them, its

overt pronoun having no referential bias.

Furthermore, a closer look into the results from Italian might shed some light on other

potential factors that may be affecting the anaphora resolution. Sorace and Filiaci

(2006), who conducted their study on Italian as well, found that Carminati’s find-

ings by which overt pronouns prefer less salient antecedents holds only for forward

anaphora, but not for logophors (backward anaphora). In logophors the most plausible


referent is an extra-linguistic one, and not the less salient of the two antecedents within

the boundaries of the sentence. With respect to the null pronouns, on the other hand,

Sorace and Filiaci were able to replicate Carminati’s findings only in the backward

anaphora case, and not the forward one (as she has with the overt pronouns). This

suggests the type of the anaphor might also play a role in the Hebrew overt pronoun

resolution, but due to the little, somewhat contradictory, results regarding the direction

of the anaphor’s effect, it seems rather unsafe to predict what it will be in our experi-

ment. It will suffice to say that any result will undoubtedly be interesting and call for

further investigation of the matter.

3.2 Method

3.2.1 Participants

Forty-eight native speakers of Hebrew participated in the experiment. The subjects

were recruited over the Internet by posting emails. Participation was voluntary and

unpaid. The data of five subjects were excluded. One was excluded due to lack of

completion of the personal details section. Another was excluded as she turned out

to be bilingual, having been brought up outwith Israel and exposed to more English

than Hebrew throughout the majority of her childhood. The three remaining subjects’

data were excluded due to them not following the instructions in such a manner that

did not allow the statistical processing of their data2. Furthermore, not following the

instructions made their entire data set questionable as it suggests they might have not

read the instructions carefully and might have misunderstood the nature of the task

altogether. Thus, forty-three subjects were left for analysis, of which twenty-three

were male and twenty female. Thirty-six subjects were right-handed and seven left-

handed. The age of the subjects ranged from twenty-one to fifty-nine years, the mean

being 31.9 years.

2These subjects assigned a value of zero to their reference item. Since all data were normalised bydividing the judgements by the reference number, as described in section 3.4, a reference value of zeroprevented their data from being normalised, and subsequently, used.


3.2.2 Materials

Training Materials

The experiment included a set of training materials whose goal was to familiarise sub-

jects with the nature of the magnitude estimation task. The training set contained six

horizontal lines, ranging between largest and smallest at a ratio of 1:10. The lines were

evenly distributed over this range, with the largest item covering the maximal window

width of the web browser. The modulus used was a line of intermediate length.

Practice Materials

After having introduced the subjects with the magnitude estimation method using vi-

sual estimation of line lengths, a set of practice items was used in order to familiarise

subjects with applying magnitude estimation to linguistic stimuli of the type they were

to later encounter in the test section. The practice set consisted of six sentences that

were representative of the test materials in some crucial respects. The items included

two proper names serving as potential antecedents, and some form of anaphora that

refers to one of them, either using a forward anaphor, or a backward one. The anaphor

type included pronouns, alongside case markers and marked prepositions. The gram-

matical functions of the potential antecedents in the items varied from subject or indi-

rect object (similar to the experimental materials) to unrelated constructions (similar

to the fillers). A wide spectrum of acceptability was covered, ranging from fully ac-

ceptable to severely unacceptable (the acceptability range in the practice items was

representative of that in the experimental items). The item used as modulus was a sen-

tence in the middle range, i.e., a sentence that was neither fully acceptable nor fully

unacceptable.

Test Materials

Twenty four two-sentence discourses similar in form to example (3.4, brought again

below for convenience) were constructed.

(3.4) Dana katva le-nina kse-φ hayta be-skotland

Dana katva3SGF to-Nina when-φ was3SGF in-Scotland


Each occurred in one of twelve forms, similar to the ones presented in Table 3.1. The

forms differed in three variables that were manipulated: the type of the pronoun (null,


overt or demonstrative), the antecedent (subject or indirect object) and the type of

the anaphor (forward or backward). A full list of materials is given in Appendix A.

The first sentence comprised of two clauses. The main clause included two proper

names serving at either one of two grammatical functions: subject or indirect object.

Both names were unambiguously of the same gender (12 sentences with male names,

12 with female names). The subordinate clause included a pronoun that referred to

one of the entities in the main clause. All three types of pronouns: null, overt or

demonstrative, could potentially refer to either one of the two proper names in the

main clause.

First Second Antecedent

Dana wrote Nina whenφ was in Scotland. Dana was in Scotland.

Dana wrote Nina whenshewas in Scotland. Dana was in Scotland.

Dana wrote Nina whensheD was in Scotland. Dana was in Scotland.

Dana wrote Nina whenφ was in Scotland. Nina was in Scotland.

Dana wrote Nina whenshewas in Scotland. Nina was in Scotland.

Dana wrote Nina whensheD was in Scotland. Nina was in Scotland.

Whenφ was in Scotland Dana wrote Nina. Dana was in Scotland.

Whenshewas in Scotland Dana wrote Nina. Dana was in Scotland.

WhensheD was in Scotland Dana wrote Nina. Dana was in Scotland.

Whenφ was in Scotland Dana wrote Nina. Nina was in Scotland.

Whenshewas in Scotland Dana wrote Nina. Nina was in Scotland.

WhensheD was in Scotland Dana wrote Nina. Nina was in Scotland.

Table 3.1: Experimental conditions

Both the proper names and the verbs were partly taken from the Hebrew treebank

(Simaan et al., 2001), based on their frequency, and partly from miscellaneous web-

sites. All verbs appeared in past tense, and no statives were used. The verbs were

carefully selected so as not to carry any potential pragmatic influences that are inher-

ent to the verbs themselves3. Furthermore, the items were chosen so as to be as neutral

as possible. In particular, the actions depicted in the main and subordinate clauses

were chosen such that the main clause verbs will not be implicative of the antecedent

of the subordinate clause from world-knowledge etc. All items were spelled usingktiv

3For instance, a subject in a pilot study pointed out that when using the verbhizdahata, empathized,it is more likely that the pronoun refers to the indirect object, describing the reason for the empathy,e.g.’Dana empathized with Nina when she got divorced’.


male, meaning the optional vowel letters appeared, in order to avoid ambiguities4. All

sentences were pre-tested in a pilot study so as to rule out biased or unclear stimuli.

In order to investigate the resolution of the anaphor to one of the potential antecedents,

the stimuli had to contain the resolution of the anaphor in some manner. As mentioned

in section 2.2, in Carminati’s 2002 studies for instance, the subjects were presented

with the two possible options to resolve the anaphor and had to chose the more nat-

ural option between them. A possible manner of translating this methodology into a

magnitude estimation study was simply to ask the subjects to rate the likelihood of

resolving the anaphor into both antecedents. However, this path was not pursued as

it was believed to carry a potential biasing effect on the subjects’ judgement. Since,

as studies have shown (Yang et al., 1999, 2001; Alonso-Ovalle et al., 2002; Sorace

and Filiaci, 2006), in some cases both antecedents are as likely to be possible resolu-

tions of the pronoun, perhaps when forced to rate both resolutions participants might

tend to stick to their choice and not acknowledge the possibility of the other resolu-

tion being possible as well, and sometimes even to the same extent. Therefore, the

resolution of the anaphor was taken as another experimental condition, and the stimuli

contained a second sentence resolving the anaphor. Each sentence appeared twice, the

two versions differing in the second sentence which resolves the anaphor (once with

the subject antecedent and once with the object one).

Fillers

The filler stimuli were similar to the test items in some respects. They too were con-

structed of two sentences, the first introducing two potential same-gender entities. The

second sentence in the stimuli offered some statement regarding one of the entities,

which was at times a resolution to an anaphor, though not necessarily explicitly (i.e.

not a repetition of the subordinate clause containing the pronoun as it was in the test

material). The fillers were not controlled for grammatical function of the antecedents,

nor for any other syntactic, semantic or other constraint.

4This form of spelling is the one normally used e.g. in newspapers, books and on the web, as thesedo not feature the vowel signs,nikkud.


3.3 Procedure

The use of overt pronouns in the discussed example (brought again below in 3.5 for

convenience) is optional in nature and suggests different degrees of grammatical ac-

ceptability and likelihood rather than strict grammatical constraints.

(3.5) Dana katva le-nina kse-hi hayta be-skotland

Dana katva3SGF to-Nina when-she was3SGF in-Scotland


This optionality allowed for by natural language calls for an experimental method

which correspondingly permits gradient judgements. Such a methodology is magni-

tude estimation, an experimental paradigm adopted from psychophysics (as proposed

by Stevens, 1975) into the linguistic judgements domain by Bard et al. (1996).

In a magnitude estimation experiment subjects assign numerical values to linguistic

stimuli in a proportional manner. The subjects are first presented with an initial stan-

dard stimulus, the modulus, to which they assign some fixed numerical value. They are

subsequently asked to elicit numerical values of the stimuli they perceive in proportion

to the number they assigned to the modulus. In other words, if a subject perceives

a certain item to be twice better than the modulus, he is required to assign it a nu-

merical value that is two times bigger than the one he assigned to the modulus. Bard

et al. (1996) showed that magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability solves the

measurement scale problems which afflict conventional judgement techniques. The

magnitude estimation methodology provides data that makes fine distinctions in a ro-

bust enough manner which yields statistically significant results of linguistic interest.

They also showed that at the same time, magnitude estimation allows for replication

across groups of subjects.

Each subject participated in an experimental session lasting approximately 15 minutes.

First, the subjects were presented with a set of instructions regarding the experiment

they were about to take part in. They then completed a short questionnaire regard-

ing their personal details which was followed by three experimental phases: a training

phase, a practice phase and an experimental phase. The experiment was self-paced,

though response times were recorded in order to enable screening the data for sub-

jects with anomalous response times. The experiment was run over the World Wide

Web, and subjects accessed the experiment remotely, using their web browser. The


browser established an Internet connection to the experimental server, which was run-

ning WebExp 2 (2005), an interactive software package for administering web-based

psychological experiments. The experimental methodology of running web-based psy-

chological experimental studies has been previously used and its validity attested for

(Keller et al., 2002; Keller and Sorace, 2003).

Instructions

A set of instructions in Hebrew was presented to the subjects prior to the beginning of

the experimental phase. The instructions commenced with a short explanation regard-

ing the technical requirements needed in order for the Hebrew fonts to properly appear

in the web browser. The latest version of java run time environment (cite by link) had

to be downloaded, alongside a configuration file. Once the subjects completed these

two operations they were able to view the experiment correctly.

Following a statement of the personal details that were to be gathered from the sub-

jects, the experimental instructions appeared. These first introduced the concept of

numerical magnitude estimation of line length. The notion of relative judgements was

explained and subjects were told they would first see a reference line, to which they

would have to assign some arbitrary number. They were then instructed they would

have to estimate the length of the following lines they will be presented with relative

to the first line they had seen, the reference line. Assigning numbers in a relative man-

ner was explained to be representative of how long the current line is in proportion to

the reference line. Several example lines and corresponding numerical estimates were

provided to illustrate the concept of proportionality.

Subjects were subsequently told that linguistic acceptability could be judged in the

same way as line length. The concept of linguistic acceptability was not defined; in-

stead, examples of acceptable and unacceptable sentences were provided, together with

possible numerical estimates to them. Subjects were made clear that they could use any

range of positive numbers for their judgments, including decimals. It was stressed that

there was no upper or lower limit to the numbers that could be used (except for them

being positive). Subjects were urged to use a wide range of numbers and to make

as fine grained distinctions as possible, distinguishing many degrees of acceptability.

It was also emphasized that there were no correct answers, and that subjects should

base their judgments on first impressions, not spending long to think about any one

sentence.


Personal details questionnaire

After the instructions were given, a short personal details questionnaire was admin-

istered. The questionnaire included name, email address, age, sex, handedness, and

academic subject or occupation. Handedness was defined as ”the hand you prefer to

use for writing”. The subjects were also requested to provide their email address for

future reference, if needed.

Training phase

The training phase was meant to familiarise subjects with the concept of numeric mag-

nitude estimation using line lengths. Items were presented as horizontal lines, centered

in the window of the subjects web browsers. After viewing an item, subjects had to

provide a numerical judgment via the computer keyboard. After they pressed Return,

the current item disappeared and the next item was displayed. There was no possibil-

ity of revisiting previous items or changing responses once Return had been pressed.

No time limit was set for either the item presentation or for the response. Subjects

first judged the modulus item, and then all the items in the training set. The modulus

was the same for all subjects, and it remained on the screen all the time to facilitate

comparison. Items were presented in random order, with the same fixed randomisation

being presented to all subjects.

Practice phase

This phase allowed subjects to practice magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptabil-

ity. Presentation and response procedure was similar to the one used in the training

phase, with linguistic stimuli being displayed instead of lines. The first sentence of the

stimulus was presented first, after which a question was presented -’How likely is the

following sentence?’The second sentence of the stimulus was then presented, offering

a resolution to the anaphor. Each subject judged the whole set of practice items. As in

the training phase, subjects first judged the modulus item, and then all the items in the

practice set. The modulus was the same for all subjects, and it remained on the screen

for the entire duration of the experiment in order to facilitate comparison. Items were

presented in random order, with the same fixed randomisation for all subjects.

Experimental phase

Presentation and response procedures in the experimental phase were the same as in the

practice phase. Twelve test sets were used: each test set contained two lexicalisations


for each of the twelve cells in the design, resulting in twenty-four stimuli. Lexicalisa-

tions were assigned to test sets using a Latin square. As in the practice phase, subjects

first judged the modulus item, which was the same for all subjects and remained on the

screen all the time. Then they were presented with forty-eight test items: twenty-four

experimental items and twenty-four fillers. Items were presented in random order, with

a fixed randomization of each of the twelve test sets for all subjects. The randomisation

of the test set was such that it did not include more than two experimental items in a

row. Each subject was randomly assigned one of the test sets.

3.4 Results

The magnitude estimation data were first normalised on a per subject basis by dividing

each of the judgements by the modulus given by the subject to the reference item.

The normalisation of all numerical judgements was carried out in order to transform

the scales of the different subjects into one common scale. Then, the results were log

transformed in order to receive the geometric means of the normalised judgments. The

use of geometric means ensures that the data are normally distributed and is standard

practice for magnitude estimation data (Bard et al., 1996; Keller and Sorace, 2003).

An overall 3×2×2 ANOVA, Pronoun type (null, overt, demonstrative)× Antecedent

(subject, object)× Anaphor type (anaphor, logophor), was conducted, once with the

participants as the random variable and once with the items as the random variable.

A significant main effect for the pronoun type was found by subjects (F1(2;84) =

6.257, p− .003), and by items (F2(2;46) = 4.408, p = .018). The more interesting

interaction effect found to be significant both by subjects as well as by items is the in-

teraction between pronoun and antecedent (F1(2;84) = 48.875, p< .0005,F2(2;46) =

62.035, p< .0005), as graphed by the (normalised, log-transformed) mean judgements

in Figure 3.1 below.

A significant effect was also found for the interaction between direction and antecedent

(F1(1;) = 32.785, p< .0005,F2(1;23) = 17.833, p< .0005), as graphed in Figure 3.2.

It suggested that anaphors prefer object antecedents, while logophors prefer subject

ones.

Although a significant effect was not found for the interaction between pronoun and

direction, examining the 3-way interaction for the relation between direction and an-


Figure 3.1: Pronoun - Antecedent interaction. Judgements for pronouns in the experi-

ment by antecedent.

tecedent with respect to the pronouns reveals more interesting insights, as graphed in

Figures 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 below. The three-way interaction was found to be significant

(F1(2;84) = 10.984, p < .0005,F2(2;46) = 3.445, p = .040).

Indeed, a post-hoc Tukey test which was conducted for the three-way interaction be-

tween pronoun, antecedent and direction (p < .01 by subjects5) revealed further in-

sights into the nature of the interaction between the pronouns and their antecedents.

The results show that the interaction between the pronoun and its antecedent is depen-

dent upon the direction of the anaphor, as is clearly depicted by Figures 3.3, 3.4 and

3.5.

The Tukey test results of differences in mean judgements presented in Table 3.2 re-

veal significant interactions for the different pronouns between subject and object an-

tecedents depending on the anaphor direction, for all cases but for the overt pronoun

in forward anaphora. In other words, all pronouns have a marked preference for their

antecedent depending on the anaphor direction, apart from the overt pronoun in the

5The Tukey test of the by item ANOVA revealed insignificant results, but for two cases. Thedemonstrative pronouns in forward anaphors significantly preferred object antecedents over subjectones (p < .01). The null pronouns in backward anaphors significantly preferred subject antecedentsover objects (p < .01)


Figure 3.2: Antecedent - Direction interaction. Judgements for anaphor direction by

antecedent.

forward anaphor condition. We notice, however, that the overt pronoun does have a

significant bias in the logophor condition, and it is only in the anaphor case that it is

equally likely to attract both types of antecedents. Table 3.3 presents the significant

biases of the different pronouns depending on directionality.

Pronoun Anaphor (subject-object) Logophor (subject-object)

Null 0.2400** 0.4146**

Overt 0.0335 0.2292**

Demonstrative 0.9190** 0.3359**

Table 3.2: Tukey table results for difference in acceptability of antecedents by pronouns

and anaphor direction. ** significant at p = 0.01

A subject antecedent was found to be significantly more acceptable than an object one

in the both null pronouns (regardless of whether it is an anaphor or a logophor) as

well as overt pronouns in logophors. No preference as to an antecedent was revealed

solely for the overt pronoun in the anaphor case. An object antecedent was found to be

significantly more acceptable than a subject one with the use of demonstratives (both

anaphor and logophor).

Furthermore, although the preference of demonstrative pronouns for an object an-


Figure 3.3: Antecedent - Direction interaction for null pronouns. Judgements for null

pronouns’ anaphor direction by antecedent.

Pronoun Anaphor Logophor

Null subject subject

Overt no preference subject

Demonstrative object object

Table 3.3: Antecedent preference by pronoun and anaphor direction

tecedent was found to be significant in both anaphors and logophors, the Tukey test

revealed that the demonstrative preferred anaphors significantly more than logophors

with both types of antecedents, and so the preference for its object antecedent was

significantly more so in the anaphor case. While the null pronouns showed no such

significant preference for the direction of the anaphor, the overt pronoun did show

a significant bias for forward anaphors when an object antecedent was used. These

results are shown in Table 3.4.


Figure 3.4: Antecedent - Direction interaction for overt pronouns. Judgements for overt

pronouns’ anaphor direction by antecedent.

Pronoun Subject (anaphor-logophor) Object (anaphor - logophor)

Null 0.0612 0.1134

Overt 0.0035 0.1992**

Demonstrative 0.3386** 0.2445**

Table 3.4: Tukey table results for difference in acceptability of anaphor direction by

pronoun and antecedent. ** significant at p = 0.01


Figure 3.5: Antecedent - Direction interaction for demonstratives. Judgements for

demonstrative pronouns’ anaphor direction by antecedent.

Chapter 4

Discussion

The results presented in the previous section suggest that some pronouns are indeed

biased toward their antecedent, as hypothesised.

Demonstrative pronouns

The demonstratives revealed a significant preference in favour of object antecedents,

as predicted and in keeping with Kaiser and Trueswell (2004, 2005) and Bosch et al.

(2003, 2006). The effect was found to be significantly larger for anaphors than lo-

gophors, which is compliant with the use of demonstratives in a logophoric manner

not being intuitively natural and in fact rather odd. Furthermore, subject antecedents

were also found to be significantly preferred in anaphors over logophors. It seems

that the logophors received lower acceptability ratings in general when used with the

demonstrative pronouns and this might have induced even the significantly less ac-

ceptable subject antecedent to be found to be significantly more acceptable in forward

anaphora.

This observation, of the lower acceptability of demonstratives in logophoric sentences,

might also shed some light on the nature of the overall significant result of the interac-

tion between direction and antecedent. As reported, anaphors were found to prefer ob-

ject antecedents while logophors prefer subject ones. This might be partly explained by

the fact that demonstratives significantly prefer anaphors, and are significantly inclined

to take object antecedents. Perhaps the strong unacceptability of the demonstrative lo-

gophor, coupled with the strong acceptability of demonstrative anaphors with an object

antecedent, can partly account for the significance of the overall direction-antecedent

interaction finding.

34

Chapter 4. Discussion 35

Null pronouns

The null pronoun, as predicted and in keeping with Carminati’s (2002) findings, showed

a strong preference toward the subject antecedent, in both anaphor and logophor con-

ditions. The former finding demonstrates that the evidence Sorace and Filiaci (2006)

show by which Italian null pronouns have no marked preference in forward anaphora

does not hold for Hebrew null pronouns. Rather, it offers supporting evidence to

Carminati’s hypothesis of a universal null pronoun preference. However, as will be

discussed below, the results regarding the overt pronoun shed a different light on these

findings.

Overt pronouns

The overt pronoun revealed a more complex bias, which was dependent on the anaphor

direction. In logophors, an effect similar to the one the null pronoun demonstrated was

found - a preference toward subject antecedents. This finding is relatively surprising,

especially with respect to Carminati’s (2002) findings and the findings by Yang et al.

(1999, 2001). By contrast, in the anaphor (forward anaphora) case, the overt pro-

noun revealed no marked preference. This correlates to some extent with Sorace and

Filiaci’s (2006) findings, whereby in Italian the overt pronoun has no preference be-

tween subject and object antecedents in anaphors, but has a marked preference only in

the logophor case. Importantly though, Sorace and Filiaci found that the Italian overt

pronoun has a significant preference toward extralinguistic antecedents, followed by

objectantecedents in logophors. This does not correlate with what was found for the

Hebrew overt pronoun which is biased towardsubjectantecedents in logophors. How-

ever, since an extralinguistic referent was not one of the optional antecedents in our

experimental design, this might have biased the results in an unwanted and unpre-

dictable manner. Perhaps, if offered, subjects would have opted for an extralinguistic

antecedent rather than both subject and object ones.

That being said, the current results obtained concerning the overt pronoun behaviour

suggests that it behaves more similarly to the Hebrew null pronoun than to the Italian

overt pronoun. This sheds a different light on the null pronoun’s behaviour, and specif-

ically with respect to Carminati’s suggestion whereby there exists a division in labour

between the null and the overt pronouns. A possible reasoning for that is that perhaps

the special pro-drop pattern in Hebrew renders the overt pronoun to behave more along

the lines of non pro-drop languages’ pronouns. If this is indeed the case, the question

Chapter 4. Discussion 36

remains what role is there for a double set of pronominal forms in a partial pro-drop

language.

General Discussion

The hypothesis this study aimed at investigating is that different pronominal forms have

different referential properties and are thus biased toward different antecedents. While

the results seem to have indicated that different pronouns indeed tend to take different

syntactic elements as their antecedent, it cannot strictly determine that it is indeed a

property of the pronouns themselves that renders them biased toward a specific an-

tecedent, or whether it is some other factor that co-occurs with certain constructions

that provides this bias. Indeed, it seems that other factors might also affect the reso-

lution of the pronoun, namely the direction of the anaphor seems to play a significant

role.

Moreover, our results cannot confirm what it is about the antecedents that renders them

preferable for a specific type of pronoun. Is it the grammatical function they occupy?

Is it their linear position? A wide variety of factors and qualities may come into mind,

among them are the grammatical function and the recency ones mentioned, as well as

topicality (as put forward by Bosch et al., 2003), theme-hood and others. In light of

these it appears that Carminati’s commitment to a specific, theoretically-binding, syn-

tactic construction might be a rather narrow approach. Although the syntactic position

has been shown to affect the antecedent bias, disregarding the other factors which seem

to be of importance, renders Carminati’s theory quite restricted.

In this light, other existing theories which are more suitable in accounting for different

influencing factors come into mind for the resolution of anaphors. Importantly, our

results are in keeping not only with Carminati’s purely syntactic-oriented model, but

also with a wide variety of theories such as accessibility theory (Ariel, 1990), center-

ing theory (Grosz et al., 1995) and other salience-scale theories (Gundel et al., 1993).

With regard to these, our results seem to suggest that Hebrew’s special pro-drop pat-

tern renders its overt pronoun to be situated in a special position on the accessibility

scale, as it does not adhere to the same logic that overt pronouns of ’normal’ pro-drop

languages such as Italian follow. The Hebrew overt pronoun seems to be closer in

behaviour to the null pronoun, which is arguably closer to the behaviour of overt pro-

nouns from non pro-drop languages. Therefore, the mystery of the existence of both

forms of pronominals in Hebrew remains to be investigated.

Chapter 5

Conclusions

5.1 Summary

Following an examination of the phenomenon of pronoun dropping, section 2 offered

an extensive review of the cross-linguistic research that has been conducted in the res-

olution of null, overt, as well as demonstrative pronouns. It also depicted the pronom-

inals behaviour in Hebrew, laying grounds for the experiment. Then, section 3 de-

scribed the experiment conducted, paying particular attention to the conceptual design

decisions made. Section 4 continues by highlighting the interesting findings and of-

fering a critical analysis of the results. It further offers interesting unresolved research

questions this study has shed light upon.

This study has provided evidence for different biases of Hebrew null, overt and demon-

strative pronouns in choosing their antecedents. While the null and demonstrative

pronouns’ biases seem to adhere to a wider cross-linguistic trend, the overt pronoun

was found to exhibit a rather distinct behaviour. The cross-linguistic differences were

pointed out to possibly stem from Hebrew’s special pro-drop pattern rendering its overt

pronoun’s role quite different from the one traditionally associated with it. It was also

suggested, following Carminati, that there might exist a scale of typologically different

overt pronouns, on which Hebrew takes a special place.

The study has further pointed to the role that the direction of the anaphor plays in the

antecedent preference. This suggests that different factors might also affect the res-

olution of the anaphor, apart from the pronominal form. Since the direction of the

anaphor is argued to be closely related to processing issues, further experiments using

37

Chapter 5. Conclusions 38

processing-oriented methodologies such as reading-time might shed further light on

the resolution of the different pronouns. It may also provide an opportunity to test other

factors potentially affecting the resolution, whether syntactic, semantic, discourse-

related or other.

5.2 Future Work

As was clearly evident from our results, the direction of the anaphor affects the bias

of the pronoun for its antecedent. This was definitely the case with the overt pronoun,

where the pronoun was biased toward a subject antecedent in anaphors, but no such

preference was detected in the logophor case. Furthermore, the demonstrative pronoun

revealed a significant preference toward anaphors, showing that pronouns are indeed

sensitive to the direction of the anaphor. This might therefore suggest that other factors

may also play a role in the pronouns’ preferences toward their antecedents, if at least in

the overt pronoun case. Not only does the direction of the anaphor change the order in

which the pronoun and the potential antecedents are encountered by the processor, but

it also manipulates theirrecency, which has been proved to affect anaphora resolution

(Gernsbacher et al., 1989; Bever and Townsend, 1978). Therefore, it might be inter-

esting to examine other factors that manipulate the recency factor as well. One such

factor is word order. As Hebrew is a language that allows relatively free word order,

a potential follow-up experiment could manipulate the order in which the potential

antecedents are encountered by using, for instance, OSV rather than SVO construc-

tions. The interaction between the different, potentially conflicting, factors that affect

anaphora resolution in general has been extensively discussed in the literature (e.g.

see Gernsbacher et al., 1989, among others), and it might prove even more so with

respect to, and in comparison to, different pronouns, namely null and demonstratives

pronouns.

The previously mentioned finding regarding the significant preference of anaphors

over logophors when using demonstrative pronouns suggests that the direction of the

anaphor also involves acceptability rather than grammaticality in their use and calls for

further investigation on its own right, either within a certain language (e.g. Hebrew),

but also cross-linguistically. Different factors might be proven to have an effect on

the acceptability of the direction of the anaphor, as was demonstrated for the pronoun

type in Hebrew. The same line of research may also be pursued with word order in


general. As Hebrew does allow relatively free word order but not entirely, and as the

less-canonical word orders (other than SVO) are less frequently used, it might prove

interesting to study the factors that affect the distribution and acceptability of these

word-orders.

Another experimental path that was previously suggested and should be pursued in

later studies is adding an extralinguistic antecedent as a possible resolution of the

anaphor. Not only has it been proved to hold in other languages such as Italian (Sorace

and Filiaci, 2006), but it might also prove to alter the results we have obtained in this

study. Indeed, not only is the overt pronoun susceptible to an extralinguistic interpreta-

tion, but the demonstrative as well. This is especially true in the less natural logophor

case, which intuitively seems to be a lot more acceptable when viewed as referring to

an extralinguistic entity.

In addition to the different research questions our data has raised that were put forward

above, it also points to a few further methodologies which may now come into use.

As this experiment confirmed the existence of a bias in the referential properties of

the different classes of Hebrew pronouns, it may serve as a baseline for other method-

ologically motivated studies into the same question. For instance, it may be followed

with a reading-time and/or eye tracking experiments which will point as to whether the

mechanism that is responsible for the pronouns’ referential bias is a processing one, or

whether it is not processing that is involved. Such methodologies enable tracking the

subject’s online linguistic behaviour and can thus offer evidence in support of process-

ing accounts which judgement experiments such as the one conducted in this study

fail to provide. Using these methods, one would make the prediction that the readings

where the preferred antecedent resolves the anaphor would result in shorter reading

times in comparison to those with the disfavoured antecedents. Eye-tracking stud-

ies may also potentially detect saccades back to the preferred antecedents in forward

anaphora.

A further line of research to be pursued is to make use of the Hebrew treebank (Simaan

et al., 2001) for a corpus study in order to study the distribution of different phenom-

ena. The use of corpus linguistics in order to account for and investigate different lin-

guistic phenomena has become common practice in computational linguistics. Bosch

et al. (2003, 2006), for instance, used antecedent preference in anaphora resolution

in accounting for the distribution of German demonstrative pronouns. In addition to

their experimental data, they also present data gathered regarding the distribution of


the demonstrative pronouns in written corpora. As they successfully show, corpus

based findings may provide reinforcing evidence that complements the judgement and

processing data. Accordingly, data from a Hebrew corpus might provide added, com-

plementing, insight into the ’real-world’ use of the different pronouns. Frequencies of

the resolution of the pronouns to their antecedents can point to the statistically prefer-

able antecedent in written text and will thus indicate the referential bias of the pro-

nouns. Moreover, the results from the conducted experiments can later be evaluated

against the findings from the corpus, and different factors (such as word order) may be

further investigated.

Appendix A

Experimental Material

Each of the experimental stimuli appeared in one of the twelve experimental condi-

tions, demonstrated by (A.1 a-l) below:

(A.1) a. Me’ir silem le-david lifney se-φ-tas le-xul.

Me’ir paid 3SGM to-David before that-φ-flew 3SGM to-abroad.

Me’ir tas le-xul.

Me’ir flew 3SGM to-abroad.

b. Me’ir silem le-david lifney se-hu tas le-xul.

Me’ir paid 3SGM to-David before that-he flew3SGM to-abroad.

Me’ir tas le-xul.


c. Me’ir silem le-david lifney se-ze tas

Me’ir paid 3SGM to-David before that-heDEM flew 3SGM

le-xul.

to-abroad.

Me’ir tas le-xul.


’Me’ir paid David before he flew abroad.’

’Me’ir flew abroad.’

d. Me’ir silem le-david lifney se-φ-tas le-xul.

Me’ir paid 3SGM to-David before that-φ-flew 3SGM to-abroad.

41

Appendix A. Experimental Material 42

David tas le-xul.

David flew 3SGM to-abroad.

e. Me’ir silem le-david lifney se-hu tas le-xul.

Me’ir paid 3SGM to-David before that-he flew3SGM to-abroad.

David tas le-xul.


f. Me’ir silem le-david lifney se-ze tas

Me’ir paid 3SGM to-David before that-heDEM flew 3SGM

le-xul.

to-abroad.

David tas le-xul.


’Me’ir paid David before he flew abroad.’

’David flew abroad.’

g. lifney se-φ-tas le-xul Me’ir silem le-david.

before that-φ-flew 3SGM to-abroad Me’ir paid3SGM to-David.

Me’ir tas le-xul.


h. lifney se-hu tas le-xul Me’ir silem le-david.

before that-he flew3SGM to-abroad Me’ir paid3SGM to-David.

Me’ir tas le-xul.


i. lifney se-ze tas le-xul Me’ir silem

before that-heDEM flew 3SGM to-abroad Me’ir paid3SGM

le-david.

to-David.

Me’ir tas le-xul.


’Before he flew abroad Me’ir paid David.’

’Me’ir flew abroad.’

j. lifney se-φ-tas le-xul Me’ir silem le-david.

before that-φ-flew 3SGM to-abroad Me’ir paid3SGM to-David.


David tas le-xul.


k. lifney se-hu tas le-xul Me’ir silem le-david.

before that-he flew3SGM to-abroad Me’ir paid3SGM to-David.

David tas le-xul.


l. lifney se-ze tas le-xul Me’ir silem

before that-heDEM flew 3SGM to-abroad Me’ir paid3SGM

le-david.

to-David.

David tas le-xul.


’Before he flew abroad Me’ir paid David.’

’David flew abroad.’

The remaining 23 lexicalisations will appear below only in the form of (A.1 a), i.e. in

the null pronoun, forward anaphor, subject antecedent condition. The other 11 forms

of each of them may be deducted from (A.1 b-l).

(A.2) Yael katva le-dana kse-φ sahata be-arcot habrit.

Yael katva3SGF to-Dana when-φ stayed3SGF in-states united.

Yael sahata be-arcot habrit.

Yael stayed3SGF in-states united.

’Yael wrote Dana while she stayed in the United States’.

’Yael stayed in the United States.’

(A.3) Mixal nofefa le-raxel kse-φ-xacta et ha-kvis.

Michal waved3SGF to-Rachel when-φ-crossed3SGF ACC the-road.

Mixal xacta et ha-kvis.

Michal crossed3SGF ACC the-road.

’Michal waved Rachel while she was crossing the road.’

’Michal crossed the road’


(A.4) Miryam yi’aca le-xana axrey se-φ-nitka et

Miriam advised3SGF to-Hannah after that-φ-hung-up3SGF ACC

ha-telefon.

the-phone.

Miryam nitka et ha-telefon.

Miriam hung-up3SGF ACC the-phone.

’Michal gave Hannah advice after she had hung up the phone.’

’Miriam hung up the phone.’

(A.5) Mixael xagag im cvi kse-φ-histaxrer

Michael celebrated3SGM with Tzvi when-φ-got 3SGM released

me-ha-cava.

from-the-army.

Mixael histaxrer me-ha-cava.

Michael got3SGM released from-the-army.

’Michael celebrated with Tzvi when he got released from the army.’

’Michael got released from the army.’

(A.6) Uri tilpen le-mose lifney se-φ-azav et

Uri phoned3SGM to-Moshe before that-φ-left 3SGM ACC

Yerusalayim.

Jerusalem.

Uri azav et Yerusalayim.

Uri left 3SGM ACC Jerusalem.

’Uri phoned Moshe before he left Jerusalem.’

’Uri left Jerusalem.’

(A.7) Dalya nifreda mi-slomit kse-φ-avra le-tel aviv.

Dalia parted3SGF from-Shlomit when-φ-moved3SGF to-Tel Aviv.

Dalya avra le-tel aviv.

Dalia moved3SGF to-Tel Aviv.

’Dalia parted from Shlomit when she had moved to Tel Aviv.’

’Dalia moved to Tel Aviv.’

(A.8) Yardena hit’alma me-rut kse-φ-hegi’a la-hofa’a.

Yardena ignored3SGF from-Ruth when-φ-arrived3SGF to-the-concert.

Yardena hegi’a la-hofa’a.

Yardena arrived3SGF to-the-concert.


’Yardena ignored Ruth when she had arrived to the concert.’

’Yardena arrived to the concert.’

(A.9) Ilana hiskima im anat kse-φ-sava me-ha-yeshiva.

Ilana agreed3SGF with Anat when-φ-returned3SGF from-the-meeting.

Ilana sava me-ha-yeshiva.

Ilana returned3SGF from-the-meeting.

’Ilana agreed with Anat when she had returned from the meeting.’

’Ilana returned from the meeting.’

(A.10) Yoni ana le-ido lifney se-φ-xazar la-basis.

Yoni answered3SGM to-Ido before that-φ-returned3SGM to-the-base.

Yoni xazar la-basis.

Yoni returned3SGM to-the-base.

’Yoni answered Ido before he had returned to the base.’

’Yoni returned to the base.’

(A.11) Yoram hitkaser le-dani’el axrey se-φ-hitpater me-ha-avoda.

Yoram called3SGM to-Daniel after that-φ-resigned3SGM from-the-job.

Yoram hitpater me-ha-avoda.

Yoram resigned3SGM from-the-job.

’Yoram called Daniel after he had resigned from his job.’

’Yoram resigned from his job.’

(A.12) Smu’el azar le-eli kse-φ-nixnas la-xeder.

Shmuel helped3SGM to-eli when-φ-entered3SGM to-the-room.

Smuel nixnas la-xeder.

Shmuel entered3SGM to-the-room.

’Shmuel helped Eli when he had entered the room.’

’Shmuel entered the room.’

(A.13) Tamar nafsa im sira axrey se-φ-hitgarsa.

Tamar went3SGF on vacation with Shira after that-φ-divorced3SGF.

Tamar hitgarsa.

Tamar divorced3SGF.

’Tamar went on vacation with Shira after she had divorced.’

’Tamar divorced.’


(A.14) Na’ama hictarfa le-talya axrey se-φ-higi’a be-ixur.

Na’ama joined3SGF to-talya after that-φ-arrived3SGF in-delay.

Na’ama higi’a be’ixur.

Na’ama arrived3SGF in-delay.

’Na’ama joined Talya after she had arrived late.’

’Na’ama arrived late.’

(A.15) Sani xiyxa le-no’omi kse-φ-nifreda le-salom.

Shani smiled3SGF to-Naomi when-φ-parted3SGF to-goodbye.

Sani nifreda le-salom.

Shani parted3SGF to-goodbye.

’Shani smiled at Naomi when she said goodbye.’

’Shani said goodbye.’

(A.16) Yuval siye’a le-rami axrey se-φ-sav habayta.

Yuval assisted3SGM to-Rami after that-φ-returned3SGM to-home.

Yuval sav habayta.

Yuval returned3SGM to-home.

’Yuval assisted Rami after he had returned home.’

’Yuval returned home.’

(A.17) Alon hoda le-omri lifney se-φ-yaca me-ha-misrad.

Alon thanked3SGM to-Omri before that-φ-left 3SGM from-the-office.

Alon yaca me-ha-misrad.

Alon left 3SGM from-the-office.

’Aon thanked Omri before he had left the office.’

’Alon left the office.’

(A.18) Itay kara le-ro’i kse-φ-lavas et ha-me’il.

Itay called3SGM to-Roy when-φ-wore 3SGF ACC the-coat.

Itay lavas et ha-me’il.

Itay wore3SGM ACC the-coat.

’Itay called Roy when he was putting the coat on.’

’Itay was putting the coat on.’


(A.19) Hila sixaka im sheli lifney se-φ-savra et ha-buba.

Hila played3SGF with Shelly before that-φ-broke3SGF ACC the-doll.

Hila savra et ha-buba.

Hila broke3SGF ACC the-doll.

’Hila played with Shelly before she had broken the doll.’

’Hila broke the doll.’

(A.20) Hadas avda im avigayil lifney se-φ-hitmanta

Hadas worked3SGF with Abigail before that-φ-was-appointed3SGF

le-menahelet bxira.

to-manager executive.

Hadas hitmanta le-menahelet bxira.

Hadas was-appointed3SGF to-manager executive.

’Hadas worked with Abigail before she was appointed executive manager.’

’Hadas was appointed executive manager.’

(A.21) Le’a naska le-efrat beteremφ-halxa haxuca.

Leah kissed3SGF to-Efrat before φ-went 3SGF to-out.

Le’a halxa haxuca.

Leah went3SGF to-out.

’Leah kissed Efrat before she went outside.’

’Leah went outside.’

(A.22) Doron hebit be-yonatan kse-φ-hexel ledaber.

Doron looked3SGM at-Jonathan when-φ-started3SGM speaking.

Doron hexel ledaber.

Doron started3SGM speaking.

’Doron looked at Jonathan when he had started speaking.’

’Doron started speaking.’

(A.23) Nadav hitpayes im Eytan kse-φ-hitxaten.

Nadav made-peace3SGM with Eitan when-φ-got-married3SGM.

Nadav hitxaten.

Nadav got-married3SGM.

’Nadav made peace with Eitan when he got married.’

’Nadav got married.’


(A.24) Yisra’el viter le-asaf lifney se-φ-araz et

Yisrael let-go3SGM to-Assaf before that-φ-packed3SGM ACC

ha-mizvadot.

the-suitcases.

Yisra’el araz et ha-mizvadot.

Yisrael packed3SGM ACC the-suitcases.

’Yisrael let Assaf go before he packed the suitcases.’

’Israel packed the suitcases.’

Appendix B

Descriptive Statistics

Pronoun Antecedent Direction Mean SD SE

null subject anaphor 0.0717 0.2671 0.0407

null subject logophor 0.1329 0.2924 0.0446

null object anaphor -0.1683 0.3392 0.0517

null object logophor -0.2817 0.4342 0.0662

overt subject anaphor -0.0298 0.3342 0.0510

overt subject logophor -0.0333 0.4167 0.0636

overt object anaphor -0.0633 0.2756 0.0420

overt object logophor -0.2625 0.3610 0.0551

demonstrative subject anaphor -0.6752 0.6978 0.1064

demonstrative subject logophor-0.3366 0.5377 0.0820

demonstrative object anaphor 0.2438 0.3168 0.0483

demonstrative object logophor-0.0007 0.3772 0.0575

Table B.1: Descriptive statistics for the experiment

49

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