Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does the syntax of a sentence constrain speakers' selection of pronominal referents? Drawing on work by functionalist grammarians, we describe the communicative effect of using a pronoun vs. a definite noun phrase, a matrix vs. a subordinate clause, and the simple past tense vs. anterior/imperfective aspect. Our analysis allowed us to predict differences in coreference judgements for the following three sentence types: He worked on a top-secret project when John was ordered to quit. He was working on a top-secret project when John was ordered to quit. When he worked on a top-secret project, John was ordered to quit. Coreference judgements from 70 speakers supported our predictions and our research program: A n adequate characterization of how syntax constrains sentence comprehension requires reference to the communicative functions performed by syntactic forms.