Choice of thirdperson pronouns in discourse

1
Choice of third-person pronouns in discourse

• Olga Krasavina
• Moscow State University / Humboldt University of
  Berlin
• krasavio_at_rz.hu-berlin.de

2
Introduction Factors of referential choice

• Salience
• familiarity (Prince 1981)
• accessibility (Ariel 1990)
• memory and attention states (Gundel et al. 1993)
• activation in consciousness (Chafe 1994)
• ...

3
Introduction Factors of referential choice

• Salience
• familiarity (Prince 1981)
• accessibility (Ariel 1990)
• memory and attention states (Gundel et al. 1993)
• activation in consciousness (Chafe 1994)
• ...
• Impact of salience-based factors
• grammatical role
• distance
• animacy
• thematic importance

4
Subject and method

• Referential expressions
• pronouns vs. other forms
• factors of referential choice?
• differences in use between types of pronouns
• Act vs. Poss
• Sg vs Pl
• Nom vs Non-Nom
• is salience enough ? is one-factor-model
  sufficient?
• Corpora annotated for coreference
• PCC (default), Stede 2004
• NEGRA (annotated animacy), Skut et al. 1997
• RST Discourse Treebank (for comparison purposes),
  Carlson et al. 2003
• Quantitative and qualitative analysis
• Automatic pre- and post-processing

5
Set-up

• antecedent (ante) properties
• subjectivity
• lexical form / lexical complexity
• beginning or end of the clause
• referent properties
• protagonism
• (local) topicality
• (absolute) centrality
• animacy/agentivity
• antecedent-anaphor properties
• parallelism
• linear hiarachical distance
• discourse features
• topical persistence

6
Results

• antecedent (ante) properties
• subjectivity reduced forms compensates
  distance
• lexical form ? no significant impact
• lexical complexity ? compensates distance
• beginning or end of the clause ?
  language-specific impact
• referent properties
• protagonism reduced forms compensates
  distance
• (local) topicality reduced forms (vs.
  demonstrative pronouns) compensates distance
• (absolute) centrality reduced forms no
  compensation
• animacy/agentivity reduced forms distance
• antecedent-anaphor properties
• parallelism pronoun-SB ante-SB
• defNP-DO ante-DO
• linear hiarachical distance local and global
  structure
• discourse features
• topical persistence
• pronouns are least dependent on
• compensates growth of distance

7
Consequences

• General
• One factor is not enough
• Rhetorical (hierarchical) recency linear
  recency
• Recency criterion clause-position, animacy,
  topicality
• Parallelism subject preference
• Actant vs possessive pronouns
• Language-specific
• German
• 1) pronoun end position of ante in a clause
• 2) actant vs possessive pronouns (wrt distance)
• English
• 1) pronoun beginning of the clause if long
  distance
• pronoun end of the clause if short distance
• 2) actant vs. possessive, singular vs. plural,
  nominative vs non-nominative (wrt distance)

8

• 1 For insurance agent Toni Johnsont, dealing
  with the earthquake has been more than just a
  work experience.
• (2) Shet lives in Oakland, a community hit hard
  by the earthquake.
• (3) The apartment Tonyt shares with hert
  sisters was rattled
• (4) but nothing was severely damaged.
• (5) Hert sister Cynthia said, Tonit should
  have a different job.
• (6) "We worry about hert out there," shet
  added.
• (Source RST Discourse Treebank)

9

• 1 For insurance agent Toni Johnsont, dealing
  with the earthquake has been more than just a
  work experience.
• (2) Shet lives in Oakland, a community hit hard
  by the earthquake.
• (3) The apartment Tonyt shares with hert
  sisters was rattled
• (3) The apartment her sisters shares with
  hert was rattled,
• (4) but nothing was severely damaged.
• (5) Hert sister Cynthias said, Tonit
  should have a different job.
• (6) "We worry about hert out there," shet
  added.