The influence of animacy on the choice of referring expressions in German
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2012/05/0012/000218Keywords:
anaphora, animacy, sentence completion task, psycholinguisticsAbstract
In this article, we present the results of a written sentence completion task in German which investigated the influence of antecedent animacy and position on the choice of referential expression. Such an effect has been shown for English (Fukumura & van Gompel 2011). However, in contrast to English, where speakers in these contexts generally chose to realize reference via full NPs or personal pronouns, in German speakers may also apply demonstrative pronouns (Ellert & Holler 2011). Thus, the current study asked whether this cross-linguistic difference would also lead to differences in reference realizations.
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