The role of subordinating conjunctions in the interpretation of null and overt subjects in native Peninsular Spanish

Fernando Martín-Villena, Antonella Sorace, Cristóbal Lozano

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Subject pronoun interpretation in native Spanish has generally been approached under the Position of Antecedent Strategy (Carminati, 2002), a parsing strategy which claims that null pronouns bias towards subject antecedents and overt pronouns towards object antecedents. While some studies align with the predicted patterns (Contemori & Di Domenico, 2021; de la Fuente, 2015), others present mixed evidence (Chamorro, 2018; Jegerski et al., 2011). To further clarify this, our study tests the offline interpretation of null and overt subject pronouns in 55 native Peninsular Spanish speakers. We additionally tested the role played by different temporal subordinating conjunctions (mientras ‘while’ vs. cuando ‘when’) in modulating subject pronoun interpretation preferences. Our findings reveal that overt pronouns bias towards object antecedents independently from the subordinating conjunction. Conversely, null pronouns bias towards subject antecedents but their interpretation is influenced by the type of subordinating conjunction, with higher rates of subject interpretations in the mientras ‘while’ condition. These results lend support to theoretical accounts such as the Form-Specific Multiple-Constraints approach (Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008), which asserts that referring expressions are subject to different constraints and to varying degrees. These findings thus extend beyond purely structural accounts and underscore the complexity of subject pronoun interpretation in Spanish.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages46
JournalApplied Psycholinguistics
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 13 Dec 2024

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The role of subordinating conjunctions in the interpretation of null and overt subjects in native Peninsular Spanish'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this