Pragmatic factors facilitate Condition C violations cross-linguistically
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0032/000505Keywords:
Condition C, aspectual backgrounding, temporal orderingAbstract
Binding Condition C prohibits coreference between a referential expression and a pronoun that c-commands it. Several non-structural factors have been argued to increase the acceptability of Condition C violating coreference interpretations, however. We report the results from a questionnaire study investigating the influence of two pragmatic factors, aspectual backgrounding and the temporal ordering of events, on the acceptability of Condition C violations in English and German. Our results show that coreference interpretations are pragmatically facilitated in both languages, lending support to pragmatic approaches to Condition C. Our results suggest, furthermore, that the relative strength of pragmatic or discourse-level factors may differ even across typologically closely related languages.
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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.
