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COHERENCE AND THE
(PSYCHO-)LINGUISTICS OF PRONOUN INTERPRETATION
Andrew Kehler UCSD Fri, October 12, 3:30pm, MJH Rm 126 More than three decades of research has sought to uncover the principles that determine how hearers interpret pronouns in context. This work has focused predominantly on identifying so-called 'preferences' or 'heuristics' that hearers utilize based on linguistic properties of antecedent expressions. This emphasis may partially explain Beaver's (2004) observation of a ``curious near absence of work within [the formal semantics and pragmatics] tradition on anaphora resolution", as with limited exceptions, the semanticist will find a striking lack of emphasis on meaning in the existing literature. Indeed, this focus is a departure from the type of approach outlined in Hobbs (1979), which argues that the mechanisms that drive pronoun interpretation are driven predominantly by semantics, world knowledge, and inference, with particular reference to how these are used to establish the coherence of discourses. In this talk, I report on new experimental evidence in support of a coherence-driven analysis, and describe how the analysis can accommodate a range of previous findings suggestive of conflicting preferences and biases. Case studies of four commonly-cited preferences are described, specifically (i) the parallel grammatical role preference (e.g., Smyth 1994), (ii) thematic role preferences (e.g., Stevenson et al. 1994), (iii) implicit causality biases (e.g., Caramazza et al. 1977), and (iv) the subject assignment strategy (e.g., Crawley et al. 1990). In each case, the experimental results offer an explanation of what the underlying source of the bias is, and predicts in what contexts evidence for it will surface. Extending a proposal by Arnold (2001), these results suggest that pronoun interpretation is incrementally influenced by (i) probabilistic expectations that hearers have about how the discourse will be coherently continued, and (ii) their expectations about what entities will be mentioned next, which, crucially, are conditioned on those coherence relationships. I will also argue that the results leave various myths by the roadside, e.g., that pronoun interpretation can be profitably thought of as a 'search and match' procedure, and that coherence relations need not be controlled for in experimental stimuli. (This talk includes joint work with Laura Kertz, Hannah Rohde, and Jeffrey Elman.) 
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