Effects of structural prominence on anaphora: The case of relative clauses
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0041/000041Abstract
In this paper we present a corpus study and a sentence completion experiment de-signed to evaluate the discourse prominence of entities evoked in relative clauses. The corpus study shows a preference for referring expressions after a sentence final relative clause to select a matrix clause entity as their antecedents. In the sentence completion experiment, we evaluated the potential effect of head type (restrictive relative clauses are contrasted with non-restrictives and restrictives with an indefi-nite head). The experimental data show that the matrix clause subject referent is strongly preferred as an antecedent, thus strengthening the conclusion that entities evoked in relative clauses are less salient than their main clause counterparts. Some remaining issues are discussed.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Eleni Miltsakaki (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
