Its prominence is her prominence: On the relationship between propositional and individual anaphoric reference

The same proposition can be encoded e.g. as a main clause or as a subordinate clause in a complex sentence. Such structural configurations influence whether and how a proposition is subsequently built upon in the discourse, e.g. by anaphoric referral. It is an open question to what extent anaphoric reference to individuals and propositions works in the same way: are the same mechanisms responsible for whether a proposition can be referred to as for whether an individual referent can be referred to? Do they affect both similarly?

We present three sets of paired anaphor resolution experiments in German manipulating the prominence relation between two competing entities: in each pair we tested the influence of how two clauses are structurally integrated on individual reference in one experiment, and on propositional reference in the other. The manipulations (syntactic configuration and typography) were the same in each pair, but between experiment pairs, we varied the type of discourse relation between the two clauses (backward causality, forward causality, violation of expectation). We find a basic pattern of correspondence between the prominence level of the proposition and of the individual referents, independent of the type of rhetorical relation between the two clauses. We propose that this is due to a process we dub Prominence Inheritance: individual referents “inherit” the relative prominence of the larger units they are part of. Our study investigates individual and propositional prominence in parallel for the first time, providing new insights into the differences and similarities between them, and into how structural and pragmatic factors impact accessibility and anaphor resolution.