Interpreting pronouns and connectives: Interactions among focusing, thematic roles and coherence relations

This paper investigates the relationship between focusing and coherence rel ations in pronoun comprehension. In their focusing model of pronoun compreh ension, Stevenson, Crawley and Kleinman (1994) proposed a default focus on the thematic role associated with the consequences of a described event, a focus that may be modified by the attention-directing properties of a subse quent connective. In this paper we examine a second function of connectives : that of signalling the coherence relations between two clauses (e.g., a N ARRATIVE relation or a RESULT relation). In three studies, we identified th e coherence relations between sentence fragments ending in pronouns and par ticipants' continuations to the fragments. We then examined the relationshi p between the coherence relation, the preferred referent of the pronoun and the referent's thematic role. The results of studies 1 and 2 showed that p eople aim to keep the focused entity, the coherence relation and the refere nt of the pronoun in alignment. Study 3 included the connective next, which enabled us to generate different predictions for the roles of focusing and coherence relations in pronoun resolution. The results favoured the focusi ng view. The preferred referent of the pronoun was the focused, first menti oned, individual, whereas the coherence relation was consistent with the th ematic role of the pronominal referent. If the pronoun referred to an Agent , a NARRATIVE relation was preferred, if the pronoun referred to a Patient, a RESULT relation was preferred. Discussion of these and other results led to the following conclusions. First, pronoun resolution is primarily deter mined by focusing, either semantic or structural, although a range of other features, including coherence relations and verb semantics, may also act a s pressures on pronoun resolution. Second, the consistent link we observed between thematic roles and coherence relations may provide a mapping betwee n a represented entity and a represented event. Third, the connectives we u sed have three distinct functions: an attention directing function, a funct ion for constraining the possible coherence relation between two events, an d a function for interpreting a clause as having either a causal or a tempo ral structure.