Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters

Abstract This paper addresses underexplored questions about referential structure impacting pronoun interpretation in multiple-pronoun and single-pronoun contexts: whether and how referential structure effects in pronoun resolution interact with information-structural factors such as topicality and focus. Regarding referential structure effects, it has been argued that demoting a higher-salience referent, which is a subject antecedent, to a lower-salience object position leads to less coherent transitions, resulting in different pronoun interpretation patterns by referential structure type. To investigate whether and how information structure interacts with referential structure effects, we disentangle information structure from subjecthood. We use a picture-writing task, where we manipulated referential structure (One-Pronoun vs. Two-Pronoun sentences) and information structure (Subject-Topic/Object-Focus vs. Subject-Focus/Object-Topic) in a dialogue setup. The results replicate previously observed referential structure effects on pronoun interpretation. Crucially, we find that both subjecthood and information structure affect these effects, but demoting a subject-focus antecedent is more dispreferred than demoting a subject-topic antecedent. We discuss how our results contribute to providing evidence of information structure contributing to referential structure effects in multiple-pronoun contexts, which have been largely overlooked in most prior work on pronoun interpretation.