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Coherence relations differ in their tendency to be explicitly marked. How such relations are recognized and what determines their tendency to be marked is a matter of debate. The connective so represents a special case: it can be used to signal Result coherence relations and the more specific cause-effect relation of Purpose, but overt marking has been claimed to be required for Purpose and optional for Result. We present written corpus and experimental results on the use of so that show that Result and Purpose with this connective can be reliably distinguished from each other, and that the modal auxiliaries can/could and will/would are strongly associated with Purpose. In the corpus study, Purpose always occurs with explicit so, while Result is often left unmarked. These results are in line with recent claims based on annotated corpus data that implicit (unmarked) and explicit (marked) coherence relations can be qualitatively different (e.g. 0320 and 0355). However, in our experiments using strongly purposive event pairs, 35–40% of examples were identified as Purpose without a connective or a modal verb cue. We argue that the difference between the corpus results and the experimental results can be explained as a difference between the tasks of speakers and hearers, and we outline an explanation for how marking can be obligatory for Purpose relations and yet optional for Result. We also propose that nonveridicality seems to play a key role in a marking requirement for Purpose, and explain why the unusual marking pattern found makes it difficult to give a pragmatic account similar to more well-known language asymmetries

Abstract

Standard Dutch and German have two reflexive forms: a weak form (zich in Dutch and sich in German) and a strong form (zichzelf in Dutch and sich selbst in German). The choice between the two reflexive forms in Dutch has been explained by the selectional restrictions of the verb, distinguishing between three verb classes: inherently reflexive verbs, accidentally reflexive verbs and transitive verbs. The same three verb classes can be distinguished in German, suggesting that the factors governing reflexive choice in Dutch and German are similar. However, several studies have pointed out that Dutch zich is more restricted in its use than German sich. We used a forced-choice task to test adult Dutch and German participants on their preference for the weak versus strong reflexive form with various verb classes and sentence types. Comparing similar sentences across the two languages, we observe an overall preference for the strong reflexive in Dutch but an overall preference for the weak reflexive in German. Looking at the participants’ reflexive choices within each language, we found effects of verb class, syntactic structure (transitive versus ECM constructions) and semantic features. Whereas the semantic feature habituality affected reflexive choice in neither language, intentionality did so in Dutch only, and tense and possibly focus affected reflexive choice in both languages. These observations seem problematic for the syntactically motivated dual-entry account of reflexive choice, but are consistent with the likelihood account.

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Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6;6 misinterpret object pronouns as coreferring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a "Pronoun Interpretation Problem". In contrast, two experiments addressing English children’s pronoun production (Bloom, Barss, Nicol and Conway, 1994; de Villiers, Cahillane, and Altreuter, 2006) show almost perfect usage. The aim of this study is to verify this asymmetry between pronoun production and pronoun comprehension for Dutch, and to investigate the effects of coherent discourse and topicality on pronoun production and comprehension. Employing a truth-value judgment task and an elicited production task, this study indeed finds such an asymmetry in 83 Dutch children (age range 4;5-6;6). When object pronouns were clearly established as the topic of the target sentence, the Pronoun Interpretation Problem dissolved entirely. These results are compatible with the asymmetrical grammar hypothesis of Hendriks and Spenader (2005/2006) and suggest, contrary to many previous claims, that children are highly proficient at using pragmatic clues in interpretation.

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Data from child language comprehension shows that children make errors in interpreting pronouns as late as age 6;6, yet correctly comprehend reflexives from the age of 3;0. On the other hand, data from child language production shows that children correctly produce both pronouns and reflexives from the age of 2 or 3. Current explanations of this asymmetric delay in comprehension have either rejected the comprehension data outright or have argued that the problems are pragmatic or caused by processing limitations. In contrast, our account, formulated in the framework of Optimality Theory, handles the comprehension data as well as the production data by arguing that children acquire the ability to take into account the alternatives available to their conversational partner relatively late. It is this type of bidirectional optimization, we argue, that is necessary for correctly interpreting pronouns.

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