Join the Linguistics Department for Elsi Kaiser’s talk, “Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Exploring Interpretation and Dissimilation of Third Person Pronouns in English and Finnish”.

Transitive clauses with two personal pronouns in coargument position (e.g. “she saw her”, “he helped him”) are perfectly natural in English. But perhaps surprisingly, such two-pronoun sequences are highly dispreferred in Finnish. To further our understanding of the notion of ‘prominence,’ I report a series of psycholinguistic studies and corpus analyses on two-pronoun sequences in English and Finnish. My recent work with Jina Song on English two-pronoun sequences shows that pronoun interpretation depends on referential structure in ways that cannot be reduced to Binding Theory: Interpretation of a subject pronoun depends on whether the clause contains a second pronoun. In other words, two-pronoun sequences exhibit distinct patterns, which we show are not reducible to semantic or syntactic parallelism. Furthermore, in striking contrast to English, I propose that Finnish is subject to a Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint: When two expressions in the same local domain are referentially distinct, realizing both as personal pronouns is dispreferred (and crucially, replacing one with an anaphoric demonstrative yields an acceptable sentence). I present evidence showing that the Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint cannot be reduced to a pure disambiguation phenomenon, nor to linear proximity, phonological similarity, or the presence of another option in the language’s anaphoric paradigm. I explore this phenomenon from a typological perspective in relation to other dissimilation phenomena, as well as obviation phenomena in languages with obviative-proximate systems. Time permitting, I will also present new data from English exploring the notion of prominence in transitive clauses from the perspective of spatial orientation effects, using a drawing task.

This event is in-person with an option to join virtually available.

Elsi Kaiser is a professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Elsi Kaiser’s primary research focus is in language processing and psycholinguistics. She investigates the processes and representations involved in comprehension and production, especially in domains that involve multiple aspects of linguistic representation (syntax, semantics, pragmatics), such as reference resolution.