Stressed and Unstressed Pronouns: Complementary Preferences

TL;DR

This paper proposes a unified account of how stressed and unstressed pronouns are interpreted in discourse, introducing the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that links their interpretation preferences.

Contribution

It introduces the Complementary Preference Hypothesis and integrates focus constraints with Centering Theory to explain pronoun interpretation preferences.

Findings

The hypothesis predicts interpretation preferences across pronoun types.

Focus constraints are interpreted as salient subsets of the domain.

The approach integrates pragmatics, focus, and discourse coherence theories.

Abstract

I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun from that of an unstressed pronoun in the same discourse position. The base preference must be computed in a total pragmatics module including commonsense preferences. The focus constraint in Rooth's theory of semantic focus is interpreted to be the salient subset of the domain in the local attentional state in the discourse context independently motivated for other purposes in Centering Theory.