TALK: Stay Connected

Suppose you overhear someone say "He said Barry ordered sushi". Even if you don't have any idea who "he" is, you know one thing for certain - that "he" is not Barry. In other sentences, though, the pronoun "he" and the name "Barry" can refer to the same person, as in "Barry said he ordered sushi" or "While he was holding the pasta, Barry ordered sushi." Whenever a pronoun and a name must refer to different individuals in a linguistic structure, this is referred to as 'non-coreference.'

Interestingly, non-coreference crops up in discourse. Suppose you overhear two people talking. One says "I know where he is hiding" and the other replies "Me too. In Barry's basement". Again, one thing you know for certain is that whoever "he" might be, "he" is not Barry.

In this talk, I will argue that the same linguistic principles that enforce non-coreference in 'connected' statements like "He said Barry ordered sushi" also apply in 'disconnected' discourse sequences, such that the pronoun "he" in one speaker's utterance becomes connected to the name "Barry" in another speaker's utterance. Finally, I will present evidence that four-year-old English-speaking children and Mandarin-speaking children know how to connect pronouns and names in ordinary declarative sentences and in discourse. And they know much more than this, since the same linguistic principles that govern the connections between pronouns and names are also used in deriving the interpretation of many other linguistic expressions, including disjunction (English "or", Mandarin "huozhe"), and negative polarity items (English "any", Mandarin "renhe").

Presented by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders