Pinning down the interaction between animacy and syntactic function in the interpretation of German and Italian personal and demonstrative pronouns

Abstract

This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent’s antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a strong tendency to refer to a preceding subject, but only if its referent is animate. With inanimate subjects, both forms tend to refer to the animate referent in object position, showing that animacy enhances a referent’s accessibility more than the syntactic function of its previous mention. Demonstratives in German and Italian generally tend to refer to object antecedents, a tendency that is also influenced by the animacy of the referent, especially in German. The cross-linguistic comparison reveals that the effect of animacy is overall stronger in German than in Italian, suggesting that across languages, different forms may show a different sensitivity to syntactic function and animacy.