Both thematic role and next-mention biases affect pronoun use in Dutch

An important question is whether speakers consider listeners’ expectations when choosing whether to use a pronoun. It has been suggested that certain thematic roles are more expected to be mentioned again, and are therefore more likely to be pronominalized. In the present study, we aim to disentangle predictability effects on pronoun use from thematic-role effects. To this end, we conducted two web-based continuation experiments in Dutch, in which the next-mention biases associated with Source-Goal and Agent-Patient verbs were manipulated to create a shift in the bias. Experiment 1 confirmed t... Mehr ...