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 hasbeen suggested that certain thematic roles are more expectedto be mentioned again, and are therefore more likely to bepronominalized. In the present study, we aim to disentanglepredictability effects on pronoun use from thematic-role ef-fects. To this end, we conducted two web-based continuationexperiments in Dutch, in which the next-mention biases asso-ciated with Source-Goal and Agent-Patient verbs were ma-nipulated to create a shift in the bias. Experiment 1 confirmedthat... Mehr ...