The Referential Properties of Dutch Pronouns and Demonstratives: Is Salience Enough?

According to many researchers, the form of referring expressions is connected to the accessibility/topicality of their referents: The most reduced referring expressions refer to highly accessible referents, whereas fuller expressions refer to less accessible referents. Thus, in languages with full and reduced pronouns, full forms are said to refer to less accessible referents. In this paper, we investigate these claims by looking at Dutch, which has full and reduced pronouns and demonstratives. We report here the results of a sentence-completion study as well as an eye-tracking experiment that... Mehr ...