Easy as ABC - Functional-pragmatic Factors Explain Binding-principle Constraints on Pronoun Interpretation: Evidence from Nine Pre-registered Rating Studies, 2019-2025

How do English-speakers interpret pronouns (e.g., himself, him and he) in sentences such as Samuel told Oliver about himself, Samuel told Oliver about the picture of him, and He was driving home, when Yusuf started coughing? Since the 1980s, patterns of (im)possible pronoun interpretation have been taken as some of the strongest evidence for highly abstract (and possibly innate) grammatical principles.

The present set of nine preregistered studies tested an alternative possibility: that listeners’ interpretations are based instead on their functional-pragmatic understanding of what the speaker most likely intended to convey, given both the speaker’s choice of words and the listener’s knowledge about the world.

Across all studies, participants’ judgments varied according to the relative real-world event-likelihood of the possible interpretations, to the speaker’s choice of the particular words used to refer to the characters given considerations of topicality (who is the “central character” in the unfolding narrative), and to whether or not other characters had been previously mentioned. Crucially, these factors did not merely nudge participants’ judgments a few percentage points in either direction.

In all studies, these functional-pragmatic factors conspired to explain a range of judgments from around 85% SUBJECT (e.g., himself=Samuel for Samuel told Oliver about himself) to 85% OBJECT (e.g., himself= Oliver for Samuel asked Oliver about himself). Thus, while the present findings cannot disprove the existence of formal binding principles, they do suggest that, once discourse-pragmatic factors have been taken into consideration, there may be little remaining for other factors to explain.