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11 - Anaphora: Experimental Methods for Investigating Coreference

from Part II - Experimental Studies of Specific Phenomena

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Elsi Kaiser
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

Anaphora play a key role in syntactic theorizing, but experimental investigations of coreference – especially when using acceptability judgments – involve unique methodological challenges. Given that non-linguist participants are unlikely to be familiar with linguistic notations such as the use of subscripts, how can researchers indicate the coreference relation whose acceptability is being assessed? In other words, if a researcher wants to test whether a particular coindexation relation is acceptable, how can this information be conveyed to participants? Ignoring this issue can yield uninterpretable data. This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of different methods for indicating coreference when researchers want to elicit acceptability judgments from participants who are not trained linguists. The chapter also discusses other approaches relevant for anaphora, including antecedent-choice tasks and real-time methods (self-paced reading, eye-tracking), and explains how they differ in terms of the kind of data they yield and thus the kinds of hypotheses they can be used to investigate.

Keywords

pronounsreflexivesanaphoraexperimental methodsexperimental syntaxacceptability judgmentscoreferenceBinding Theorysentence processing
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 278 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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