Glossa Psycholinguistics

1.1 Reflexive anaphors and Binding Theory

In the forty years since Chomsky (1981) first proposed the Binding Theory, there has been a wealth of research on the form, distribution, and interpretation of reflexive anaphors (henceforth reflexives). The 1981 Binding Theory consists of three syntactic principles. Two of the principles are stated in (1a), with some relevant terms defined in (1b).

Principle A requires reflexives and other anaphors to have a c-commanding antecedent in a designated local domain—a domain roughly equivalent to the clause. Principle B requires pronominals (ordinary personal pronouns) not have a c-commanding antecedent in this local domain. Together, Principles A and B paint a simple, appealing picture in which reflexives and pronominals are in complementary distribution: in structures in which a reflexive is grammatical, the corresponding pronominal with the same index is ungrammatical.

It quickly became clear that this picture is too simple. On the one hand, reflexives are heterogeneous, both crosslinguistically and within individual languages. The heterogeneity extends to their morphosyntax, the domains within which they must be bound, the types of DPs that can bind them, their (in)sensitivity to perspective, and so on (Reinhart & Reuland 1993; Cole et al. 2006; Kiparsky 2015; Déchaine & Wiltschko 2017; Reuland 2018; Charnavel 2021). These language-specific details must be stipulated. On the other hand, under the right discourse conditions, a pronominal can appear to have a c-commanding antecedent in its local domain. Such pronominals often have a different interpretation from the corresponding reflexive (Reinhart 1983; Heim 1998). In response to all this, numerous attempts have been made to update, revise, or replace the Binding principles in (1a) (Reinhart 1983; Burzio 1991; Levinson 1991; Pollard & Sag 1992; Reinhart & Reuland 1993; Levinson 2000; Wilson 2001; Safir 2004; Reuland 2011; Safir 2014; Kiparsky 2015). These attempts are conceptually and analytically diverse. What they share is that—unlike the 1981 Binding Theory—they are not exclusively syntactic. Instead, they account for the distribution of reflexives and pronominals by appealing to the interaction of syntax, semantics-pragmatics, and morphology. Most such approaches adopt some or all of the following assumptions:

• (i)   The binding of reflexives and other anaphors is enforced by a constraint of grammar that refers to syntactic structure, either in the syntax proper or in Logical Form. This constraint requires an anaphor to be bound by a c-commanding antecedent in some designated domain.

• (ii)  Reflexives must be bound because they are referentially defective—more precisely, deficient in syntactic features. The usual assumption is that they originate without phi-features (i.e. person, number, gender) and acquire these features from the antecedent that binds them.¹

• (iii) A constraint that is semantic-pragmatic, or perhaps morphological, ensures that when a reflexive is grammatical, the corresponding pronominal is ungrammatical. The local domain over which this constraint holds is often defined semantically, in terms of a predicate and its arguments (Sells 1985; Farmer & Harnish 1987; Levinson 2000). To quote Farmer & Harnish (1987: 557): “The arguments of a predicate are intended to be disjoint, unless marked otherwise.”

• (iv)  Within a given language, the norm is for different types of reflexives to be distinguished by their morphological form. Similarly, the norm is for reflexives to be morphologically distinguished from pronominals (e.g. the English reflexive themselves vs. the pronominal them). What is relevant here is that these norms are merely tendencies (Levinson 2000; Safir 2014; Kiparsky 2015). Languages occasionally violate them; for instance, reflexives are not morphologically distinguished from pronominals in languages such as Old English (Levinson 2000; Keenan 2002), Samoan (Chapin 1970), and—as we will see shortly—Chamorro.

One challenge for all approaches to Binding Theory is to explain why reflexives should be morphologically distinguished from pronominals in the first place. Safir (2014), who is one of the few to address this question directly, states, “One might reasonably speculate that the manifestation of this sort of morphological within-phase distinction, expressible in the syntax, might be reinforced by functional pressure for systems where semantic binding at the most local opportunity is distinguished interpretively from semantic binding that requires a longer store” (p. 119). The exact character of this functional pressure is unclear. Conceivably, it might be related to Levinson’s (2000: 273) claim that “where a coreferential interpretation is available it will generally provide an informationally richer, more informative, stereotypical, and ‘better’ interpretation” than a noncoreferential interpretation.

What functional pressure might privilege semantic binding at the most local level? This question could potentially find an answer in language processing. But previous research on the comprehension of reflexives has been limited to languages in which they are morphologically differentiated from pronominals, such as English and Mandarin (see Dillon 2014 for a review). It is unknown how comprehension proceeds in languages in which the two are not morphologically distinct. In two experiments, we probed the comprehension of reflexives in Chamorro, an Austronesian language that is spoken in the Mariana Islands. Chamorro has no morphologically distinct reflexive anaphors; instead, reflexive clauses are constructed with ordinary pronoun forms. We asked two questions. First, given that Chamorro has no morphologically distinct reflexives, what cues, if any, do comprehenders rely on when deciding whether to interpret a given pronoun form as reflexive? Second, when such cues are entirely absent, is there nonetheless ‘functional pressure’ that favors a reflexive interpretation when it is available (and grammatical)?

The rest of this introduction surveys the literature on the processing of reflexive pronouns (in 1.2) and then introduces relevant aspects of the morphosyntax of Chamorro (in 1.3). Section 2 discusses Experiment 1, a touch-tracking picture-matching experiment that examined the comprehension of transitive clauses whose object could be interpreted as reflexive. Section 3 discusses Experiment 2, a picture-matching experiment that examined the comprehension of clauses in which the possessor of the object could be interpreted as reflexive. Section 4 concludes.

1.2 Processing reflexive anaphors

In sentence processing, anaphora resolution is construed as a set of processes for identifying the antecedent of a reflexive anaphor, pronominal, or other anaphoric element and linking the two.² This has proven to be a fruitful area of investigation because it demands theories of how the processor is able to coordinate representations across several levels—lexical, syntactic, semantic, and so on. Such coordinated representations are richly structured and Janus-like. On the one hand, they prospectively generate expectations about upcoming elements (Arnold & Tanenhaus 2011). On the other hand, these representations must be reactivated or navigated when an anaphoric element is encountered. An early suite of studies on the processing of reflexive anaphors and pronominals in English asked whether the principles of the Binding Theory act as “early filters” to generate the candidate antecedents for the anaphor or pronominal (Nicol & Swinney 1989; Badecker & Straub 2002; Sturt 2003). In the past decade, the questions addressed by this research have been recast as questions about memory retrieval (Dillon 2014) or a “mix of retrieval and expectancy-based processes” (Kaiser et al. 2009). What are those retrieval processes, and do they manifest a functional pressure for local binding?

Psycholinguistic theory was re-attuned to the associative character of working memory by the influential language processing experiments of McElree (2000), McElree et al. (2003), and Van Dyke & Lewis (2003), and the accompanying computational proposals of Lewis & Vasishth (2005) and Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke (2006). The core claim is that recently-encountered linguistic material can be accessed in two ways: (i) directly, as an item or feature in the focus of attention; or (ii) associatively retrieved, using a set of cues provided by the grammar/parser in the local context. The associative character of retrieval was revealed in contexts in which the matrix verb being processed was preceded by a complex subject phrase (Van Dyke & Lewis 2003; Wagers et al. 2009). Constituents within the complex subject which are syntactically inaccessible but, critically, partially match the requirements of the matrix verb can influence processing at the verb. This is unexpected if the verb’s dependents are identified by strictly traversing a hierarchical representation like a tree; however, it follows if the verb’s dependents are identified by a cue-based retrieval in which recently encountered elements are re-activated as a function of their similarity, or match, to the cues. Elements that partially match are prone to cause interference (Van Dyke & McElree 2011).

Against this background, reflexives have “stuck out”: unlike subject-verb agreement or even the thematic integration of the subject, the dependency between a reflexive anaphor and its antecedent is less vulnerable to interference. This generalization, which was suggested by earlier research (Phillips et al. 2011), was directly validated by Dillon et al. (2013) in a series of eye-tracking and computational modeling studies which compared the processing of subject-verb agreement and the processing of reflexive anaphors. However, the apparently special behavior of reflexives may be a matter of degree, rather than kind. For example, Jäger et al.’s (2017) metanalysis suggests that interference effects do exist in reflexive anaphora, but are considerably smaller than in subject-verb agreement. And Parker & Phillips (2017) provided evidence that, when a reflexive direct object pronoun mismatched the subject of its clause (the closest DP that could potentially bind it) in more than one feature, nonlocal potential binders could have an impact on comprehension and could ease the effects of ungrammaticality. Of course, this does not, on its own, explain why reflexive anaphora and subject-verb agreement show different degrees of resilience to distractors. What is responsible for the extra “protective factor” of reflexives?

Parker & Phillips (2017) relate the protective factor of reflexive pronouns to their (un)-predictability and how that affects the quality of the retrieval cues used by the comprehender. They conjecture that, because reflexive pronouns are simply less predictable than agreeing verbs, resolving the dependency between a reflexive and its antecedent will depend more on retrieval and less on prediction. Consequently, they reason, the comprehension mechanism will more strongly weight cues related to the dependency’s structural requirements. In contrast, the features of agreeing verbs can routinely be predicted from their agreement controllers. This means that retrieval might simply not be needed to resolve every subject-verb dependency, as pointed out by Wagers et al. (2009). And consistent with that view, interference, in the guise of “agreement attraction”, occurs most reliably in ungrammatical strings when the prediction made about the verb’s features fails.

Put in slightly different terms, the structural constraints that apply to subject-verb agreement are typically implemented prospectively, by predicting a verb of the right type and position. The structural constraints that apply to reflexive anaphora are typically implemented retrospectively, by incorporating them as part of the cue set used during retrieval.³

Structural cues have been considered challenging to implement using standard associative memory mechanisms, because structural constraints are often conceived of as relational and open-ended. For example, the c-command relation can be evaluated for any two heads or projections in the structure, but “being a c-commander” isn’t an inherent feature of any given head. Thus, it cannot be recruited as a feature to use during retrieval. This problem, however, is not insuperable, because there are inherent features that could serve as reasonable surrogates. For example, in resolving a reflexive-antecedent dependency, the parser may do well to first reactivate subjects, which are the classic antecedents of reflexives, even though these might not be co-extensive with the entire set of c-commanding DPs. And an attribute like nominative case, or a similar feature involving grammatical relations, could be used to directly identify elements in “subject position” (Arnett & Wagers 2017).

Another open-ended relation is locality: can the parser limit the retrieval of preceding elements to just the local ones, since “being local” is not a fixed feature of any given item? Surrogates are probably available here, too. For example, Wagers (2008) proposed that all elements are encoded with a global state vector which evolves slowly with the parser’s state (cf. Howard & Kahana 2002), but changes more rapidly at clause boundaries. This would allow retrievals to initially target more local elements or, at least, elements belonging to the same clause. And some evidence suggests that the search for a reflexive’s antecedent can first target just the subject of the local clause (henceforth, the local subject). Dillon et al. (2014) investigated the processing of the Mandarin long-distance reflexive ziji. This reflexive anaphor can have a c-commanding antecedent that is the local subject or the subject of a higher clause, and can also function as a logophor (cf. Huang & Liu 2001; Cole et al. 2006). At stake in their experiment was the speed of accessing the local subject versus a more distant subject in the next higher clause. (2) illustrates this contrast, which takes advantage of the fact that the antecedent of ziji must be animate and sentient: in (2a), the only acceptable antecedent, Coach Zhang (underlined), is the more distant subject, while in (2b), the only acceptable antecedent is the local subject. Dillon et al. (2014) used the MR-SAT response-signal technique (Wickelgren et al. 1980; Martin & McElree 2008) to measure the speed-accuracy trade-off function for judging the acceptability of sentences like (2a–b). The key result was a dynamics difference in the SAT function. Participants were faster at recognizing (2b) as acceptable compared to (2a), even though participants ultimately preferred sentences in which ziji was bound by the more distant subject, as in (2a).

Dillon et al. (2014) constructed two computational models to explain these differences, both grounded in an associative memory. In their Local Search model, comprehenders initially attempt to retrieve only local antecedents—that is, antecedents that are local subjects. Only if this fails do they then proceed to cast a wider net. In the Unrestricted Search model, comprehenders do not specifically search for local antecendents, but a locality advantage can emerge due to the prominence or recency of the local subject. In both models, the characteristic that controls how well they fit the data is how often memory has to be sampled to attain a compatible antecedent (or, more precisely, the probability distribution over number of samples). In a model comparison analysis, Local Search outperformed Unrestricted Search with a 5:1 Bayes Factor advantage.

The question prompted by their study is why comprehenders engage in Local Search when multiple subjects are available that could serve as grammatical antecedents of ziji. If a locally-bounded search is necessary, or strongly incentivized for other reasons, then that could support the idea that Safir’s (2014) functional pressure for local binding is a processing pressure. What remains unknown is whether this pressure would be observed in the absence of a morphological distinction between reflexives and pronominals.

1.3 Chamorro

Chamorro is a verb-first language in which the word order of arguments after the verb is not fixed. Clauses can be Verb Subject Object (VSO) or Verb Object Subject (VOS), although VSO is the default. Subjects or direct objects (henceforth simply objects) that are personal names are preceded by the case marker si; otherwise, subjects and objects have no overt case marking; see (3). In this and other examples, CD identifies sentences taken from the electronic database for the Revised Chamorro-English Dictionary.

The verb agrees with the subject through a prefix or proclitic that also indicates transitivity and mood. When the verb is transitive, this agreement registers person and number. In (3), for instance, the proclitic ha indicates that the subject is third person singular, the verb is transitive, and the mood is realis.

Chamorro has both overt and null pronouns.⁴ Pronouns that are cross-referenced by agreement in person must be null. These necessarily null pronouns include the pronoun subjects of transitive verbs and pronoun possessors, such as the possessor of kålulut ‘finger’ in (3b). Otherwise, animate pronouns can be overt or null; see the object pronoun in (4).

The overt object pronoun forms are weak pronouns, which must immediately follow the verb (in the clauses discussed here). Thus, in a transitive clause, a pronoun subject must be null and a pronoun object must immediately follow the verb.

2.1 Chamorro reflexive clauses

Chamorro has no morphologically distinct reflexive anaphors. Ordinary pronoun forms are used when a pronoun is interpreted as reflexive, that is, bound by a c-commanding antecedent in the local clause (= the clause most immediately containing the pronoun). Consequently, many reflexive clauses have no morphology at all that distinguishes them from nonreflexive clauses; see (5).

Pronouns that are interpreted as reflexive are generally overt. This is why the weak pronoun object in (6a) can be interpreted as reflexive, but the null pronoun object in (6b) cannot be. However, a null pronoun can be interpreted as reflexive when it is cross-referenced by agreement in person and therefore cannot be overt. For instance, the null pronoun possessor in (6c) can have a reflexive interpretation because it is cross-referenced by the 3sg. possessor-noun agreement suffix -ña.

Finally, verb morphology can signal that a pronoun object is interpreted as reflexive. In such cases, the reflexive adverb maisa ‘(by one)self’ combines with the verb to form a reflexive verb, as in (7).

The combination of the verb plus maisa forms a single phonological word. This is why reduplication for the progressive aspect, which doubles the stressed CV of the verb, doubles the first CV of maisa in (8).

The presence or absence of maisa seems to have no semantic effect; compare (5b) and (7).

The absence of morphologically distinct reflexive anaphors raises the issue of whether Chamorro is constrained by the Binding Theory at all. The issue is whether pronouns that are interpreted as reflexive differ syntactically from other pronouns, despite the absence of any morphological distinction. In fact, Chamorro grammar does indeed distinguish pronouns that are reflexive anaphors from other pronouns (which are pronominals). We show this here for pronoun objects.

The most straightforward evidence comes from the Chamorro restrictions that ensure that subjects are salient (i.e. topical or noteworthy). Some of these restrictions demand that the subject have a minimum level of salience; others ensure that the subject is at least as salient as the object. For instance, the person-animacy restriction (PAH) prevents the object from outranking the subject in person or animacy (Chung 2014, 2020; Clothier-Goldschmidt 2015). One subcase of the PAH prevents a transitive verb from having an animate pronoun as the object when the subject is a nonpronoun. The transitive clauses (9a–b) conform to the PAH, but the ungrammatical (9c) does not.

Another such restriction is the third plural restriction (TPR), which prevents a transitive verb from having a subject that is third person plural, but not a pronoun (Chung 2020). The transitive clause (10a) obeys the TPR, but the ungrammatical (10b–c) do not.

The PAH is sometimes violated in elicitation contexts in fieldwork, but is a hard constraint in production (Clothier-Goldschmidt 2015). The TPR is never violated. Both restrictions exhibit morphological quirks that are irrelevant here.⁵ When a clause would violate these restrictions, the typical remedy is to employ the corresponding passive, since passives are intransitive.

Significantly, the PAH and the TPR do not affect transitive clauses in which a pronoun object is interpreted as reflexive. These reflexive clauses systematically escape the restrictions. The reflexive clauses in (5b), (7), and (8) ought to violate the PAH, given that their object is an animate pronoun but their subject is a nonpronoun. Nonetheless, they are grammatical. Similarly, the reflexive clauses in (11) ought to violate the TPR, because their subject is third person plural but not a pronoun. These clauses are grammatical as well (Chung 1989).

It is important that the pronoun object must be bound by the local subject in order for the clause to evade the PAH and the TPR. Clauses in which the pronoun object is bound instead by a c-commanding antecedent in a higher clause, or merely has an antecedent in previous discourse or a nonlinguistic antecedent, conform to the PAH and the TPR as expected. This pattern reveals that Chamorro grammar differentiates object pronouns that are interpreted as reflexive from other object pronouns. These pronouns are reflexive anaphors, even though they are not morphologically differentiated from other pronoun forms.⁶

The fact that reflexive anaphors are not distinguished by their morphological form raises the question of how they are recognized in comprehension. What cues are comprehenders sensitive to as they decide whether to interpret a given object pronoun as reflexive, and how does comprehension proceed when those cues are absent? Experiment 1, which investigates these questions, was designed to test two initial predictions. The first prediction was that comprehenders would be biased toward the reflexive interpretation by indirect cues, such as the reflexive adverb maisa, or a subject-object combination that would otherwise violate the PAH. The second was that when these cues were removed, the choice between the reflexive and nonreflexive interpretations would be essentially free. In brief, the results confirmed the first prediction, but not the second. Participants preferred reflexive interpretations, even with no direct or indirect morphological signal to guide them.

2.2 Participants

96 Chamorro speakers participated in Experiment 1, which took place in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) in September 2016. They grew up in Saipan (39), Rota (49), Guam (5), and Tinian (3). Participants ranged in age from 22 to 70, with a median age of 45 years, and an inter-quartile range of 15.5 years. 56 participants reported that they had taken part in a previous experiment.

2.4 Results

ReflAdv Present conditions gave rise to reflexive responses in nearly all trials: 544 of 556 valid responses were reflexive responses (98%). Control trials, where the interpretation was constrained to be disjoint, either by the PAH alone or in conjunction with Plausibility, gave rise to reflexive responses infrequently: 57 of 557 valid responses were reflexive responses (10%). Thus, participants could perform the task accurately, and were able to discriminate two classes of sentences with unambiguous interpretations.⁹ Table 2 gives the percentage of reflexive choices for each condition and a logistic regression on the ReflAdv × LclSubj design, showing that both the ReflAdv and LclSubj factors affected choices.

In the ReflAdv Absent conditions, comprehenders made fewer reflexive choices overall. In these conditions, no special morphology marks reflexivity: only by virtue of the use of gui’ and the PAH can the comprehender calculate when a reflexive interpretation is allowed or required. We predicted that the presence of a LclSubj Nonpronoun would force a reflexive interpretation, given that the PAH should exclude the disjoint interpretation. Reflexive interpretations did, in fact, predominate, but they were not as common as in the ReflAdv Present conditions. The PAH has no impact when the LclSubj is a pronoun, so in this condition both the reflexive and disjoint interpretations should be possible. Here, we found fewer reflexive choices compared to the corresponding LclSubj Nonpronoun condition, but comprehenders still preferred reflexive interpretations.

We further modeled reflexive choices on three related conditions: the two ReflAdv Absent conditions and the PAH-Only control. These three conditions are linked because their interpretations are not constrained by verbal morphology (and they did not give rise to near-perfect performance). We constructed a Bayesian multilevel logistic regression on these conditions.¹⁰ We represented the differences among them with two coefficients coded using Helmert contrasts. One coefficient, pah strength, compared the two unambiguous conditions (LclSubj Nonpronoun and PAH-Only); the other coefficient, reflexive preference, compared the critical ambiguous condition (LclSubj Pronoun) with the mean of the two unambiguous conditions. Estimates of these coefficients support the following three conclusions.

• (i)   Participants were overall quite good at recognizing the environments in which the PAH applied: pah strength, 3.92, s.e.: 0.48; 95% CredInt: 3.01–4.88; Intercept, 0.51, s.e.: 0.26; 95% CrI: 0.00–1.01.

• (ii)  Participants recognized the PAH environments symmetrically, making about as many errors on reflexive interpretation as they did on disjoint interpretation (13–14%). This symmetry can be revealed by deriving a median reflexive choice rate of 51% (95% CrI: 38%–63%) across posterior samples of the model.

• (iii) Participants had a clear reflexive preference in the LclSubj Pronoun condition. reflexive preference, 1.41 (s.e.: 0.26; 95% CrI: 0.92–1.95). Median reflexive choice rate in this condition of 81% (95% CrI: 69%–89%).

We measured when participants initiated their response by first touching the tablet. Figure 2 plots the overall distribution of this variable, the Touch Time (TT). When we first considered the four target conditions, we found two simple effects: TTs were much faster in refladv Present conditions (–1106 ms, 95% CrI [–1461 ms, –747 ms]) and in LclSubj Nonpronoun conditions (–742 ms, 95% CrI [–1106 ms, –386 ms]). In this way, faster TTs correlate with conditions in which more reflexive responses were given. This is unsurprising if those conditions are the ones in which multiple grammatical constraints combine to deliver a more confident reading.

Figure 2

Experiment 1 Touch Times. Each panel shows histograms of response initiation times (“Touch Times”) for refl and disj responses in the given condition. Vertical lines indicate median initiation times in that condition and response type for correct responses only.

If we consider just the critical ReflAdv Absent:LclSubj Pronoun condition, we can ask whether participants gave faster responses to the disj or the refl reading. Although the disj reading gave rise to slightly slower TTs on average (215 ms), the 95% credible interval of TT for disj responses was –879 ms to 1249 ms. While we often expect minority responses to give rise to longer response times, we may simply have not had adequate power to resolve a true effect. Nonetheless, we found no evidence from TTs to suggest that the disj reading is somehow less accessible than the refl reading.

Inspection of individual item rates suggests that considerable variation was linked to specific item properties. We believe that the source of this variability was the verb’s argument structure—specifically, whether its Theme argument (which was always realized as the direct object in our stimuli) must be animate. Seven of our verbs require their Theme to be animate (e.g. na’chotchu, ‘feed’, suda’i, ‘find for’). When we split the data by this feature, the average percentage of reflexive choices for the critical ambiguous sentences was only 57% for verbs that require an animate Theme (n = 7) versus 93% for verbs that do not require this (n = 11; e.g. litratu, ‘photograph’, tåmpi, ‘cover’). To further explore the strength of the relationship between argument structure and reflexive interpretation, we added verb type and its interaction with the experimental conditions as a covariate to our model. Estimates from this richer model are plotted in Figure 3B, which shows an overall decrease in reflexive choices when the verb requires its Theme to be animate. This is reflected in a simple effect of verb type, 1.54 (s.e.: 0.43; 95% CrI: 0.70–2.39). The interaction of verb type with pah strength – the comparison between the two unambiguous conditions – was nearly zero (0.01, s.e.: 0.99; 95% CrI: –1.93–1.99). The averages plotted in Figure 3 suggest that the effect of verb type is strongest for the ambiguous condition (ReflAdv Absent:LclSubj Pronoun). The interaction of verb type with reflexive preference, which would quantify this impression, was positive (0.64, s.e.: 0.52), but the 95% CrI includes many negative values (–0.38–1.66). Therefore, it would be premature to conclude that this effect is confined only to the ambiguous condition. We instead interpret it as an across-the-board effect.¹¹

Figure 3

Verb Type influences reflexive choice. Panel A plots the reflexive choice rate for the two ReflAdv Absent conditions, namely, LclSubj Pronoun (filled symbol) and LclSubj Nonpronoun (open symbol). Items are ordered by reflexive choices in LclSubj Pronoun. Color indicates whether the verb requires its Theme to be animate (green) or does not require this (purple). Panel B plots average reflexive choice rates by condition and verb type. Bars represent 95% credible intervals; black crosses mark model averages, and filled symbols the data averages. Control condition refers to the PAH-Only control.

While this analysis is exploratory, we tentatively conclude that the verb’s argument structure modulates how the comprehender interprets the object pronoun gui’. Further research would be needed to establish whether this effect is independent of the reflexive adverb.

2.5 Experiment 1: Discussion

The results from Experiment 1 show that comprehenders can accurately parse sentences whose object is unambiguously reflexive, even though Chamorro has no morphologically distinct reflexive pronouns. Sentences in which the reflexive adverb maisa appeared were almost invariably interpereted as reflexive. Sentences in which the local subject was a nonpronoun, and therefore a disjoint interpretation was excluded by the PAH, were interpreted as reflexive almost as frequently. The PAH was not as effective a cue as the reflexive adverb. We attribute this to the fact that maisa is a direct morphological signal of reflexivity, whereas the PAH’s impact on interpretation can only be calculated once the subject and object DPs are identified and their lexico-semantic content is compared. It is not surprising that comprehenders might make an interpretive choice before the evidence provided by these calculations is available.

When the local subject was a pronoun and the reflexive adverb was absent, the object pronoun was technically ambiguous between the reflexive and disjoint interpretations. However, comprehenders’ choices revealed a strong preference to interpret these sentences as reflexive. We attribute this reflexive advantage to two morphosyntactic factors. First, the object pronoun gui’ contrasts with the null object pronoun, which is never reflexive and, therefore, always disjoint from the local subject. Armed with this knowledge, comprehenders might reasonably infer that had a disjoint interpretation been intended, the speaker would have chosen the null object pronoun. The second factor is the PAH. The verbs in the ReflAdv Absent conditions show 3sg. subject-verb agreement and are immediately followed by the 3sg. object pronoun gui’. The subject, if overt, is encountered only later. Consequently, an early commitment to a reflexive interpretation of gui’ is a safe choice, because the result will always be grammatical. In contrast, an early commitment to a disjoint interpretation comes with the risk that the subject might be a nonpronoun, in which case the PAH would be violated and reanalysis would be required.

How can we be sure that the reflexive advantage is a real preference, and not merely response bias? If participants had an overall bias to make reflexive responses, we should have found fewer errors in the ReflAdv Absent:LclSubj Nonpronoun condition, and more errors in the PAH-Only Control condition. In fact, the error rates were identical: 13% (see Table 2). This suggests that, in Experiment 1, neither reflexive nor disjoint interpretation was favored.

We were surprised to find a correlation between the proportion of reflexive interpretations and the verb’s argument structure. When the verb required its Theme to be animate, the reflexive advantage was very slight indeed. When the verb did not require this, the reflexive advantage was as strong as in the ReflAdv Present conditions and the PAH-Only controls, when the sentence had only a reflexive interpretation. We speculate that the reflexive advantage is generally strong in sentences of this type, but can be depressed by a semantic-pragmatic factor—the verb’s argument structure—as follows. Recall that a predicate’s arguments are “intended to be disjoint, unless marked otherwise” (Farmer & Harnish 1987, p. 557). Animate entities are known to be more salient in general than inanimate entities (Ferreira 1994; Prat-Sala & Branigan 2000; cf. Nairne et al. 2013), and animacy requirements have been shown to be especially prone to trigger predictive processing (Wagers & Pendleton 2016; Wang et al. 2020). We conjecture that when the comprehender encounters a verb that requires its Theme to be animate, a robust prediction develops for the features of the upcoming DP that will realize this argument. This raises the salience of the two animate referents in the discourse and, by doing so, enhances the default for the predicate’s arguments to be disjoint. As a result, the reflexive advantage is largely neutralized. Put more succinctly, the verb’s argument structure jump-starts the default disjoint interpretation of the Theme before the object pronoun is encountered, preempting any processes that favor a reflexive interpretation.

Experiment 1 shows that Chamorro comprehenders can easily access the reflexive interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing an object pronoun, even in the absence of direct morphological signals of reflexivity. Reflexive interpretations do have at least two indirect cues. First, a reflexive interpretation forecloses the possibility of a PAH violation triggered by combining a pronoun object with a nonpronoun subject. Second, only overt object pronouns can be reflexive, so the use of the overt 3sg. object pronoun gui’ as opposed to the null object pronoun is possibly informative. A comprehender who tries to predictively interpret a sentence based only on a transitive verb and the object pronoun gui’ will find themselves effectively hemmed in by the unspoken alternatives.

What would happen if this conspiracy of constraints and unspoken alternatives was removed? In Experiment 2, we investigate pronoun possessors of the object. Possessor pronouns, like object pronouns, have no dedicated reflexive forms. In addition, because of Chamorro’s flexible word order, a possessor pronoun within the object can precede or follow the local subject. Possessor pronouns differ from object pronouns in that they (i) are not arguments of the verb, (ii) must be null, and (iii) are generally not constrained by the PAH.¹² They therefore provide a neutral testing ground to assess whether the reflexive interpretation, in and of itself, has any privileged role in the comprehension of Chamorro pronouns.

3.1 Chamorro possessors

Nouns in Chamorro can be preceded by an article and followed by a possessor. A possessed noun either agrees with the possessor in person and number (see (14a)) or else is joined to the possessor by a morpheme called the linker (14b).

When the possessor is a pronoun, the possessed noun must agree with it; there is no linker option. This means that possessor pronouns are cross-referenced by agreement in person, and therefore must be null; see (15).

Like object pronouns, possessor pronouns can serve as reflexive anaphors or as pronominals. Evidence for this is provided by the TPR. Recall that the TPR prevents a transitive verb from having a subject that is third person plural, but not a pronoun (see 2.1). This restriction is systematically evaded by clauses in which the object is a reflexive anaphor. In addition, the TPR is evaded by clauses in which a pronoun possessor of the object is bound by the local subject. The transitive clauses in (16) are grammatical, despite the fact that their subject is third person plural but not a pronoun, because their object’s possessor is a (null) pronoun that is bound by the subject.

Reflexive clauses of this type are grammatical whether the subject precedes or follows the object. As long as the object’s possessor is a pronoun bound by the local subject, the clause escapes the TPR. But if the possessor pronoun had been bound by a c-commanding antecedent in a higher clause, or had had a discourse antecedent or a nonlinguistic antecedent, the TPR would take effect as expected. This is evidence that the possessor pronouns in (16) are reflexive anaphors; they differ syntactically from possessor pronouns that are pronominals, even though the two are morphologically indistinguishable (since all possessor pronouns are null).

3.2 Participants

114 Chamorro speakers participated in Experiment 2, which took place in the CNMI in June 2019. They grew up in Saipan (58), Rota (51), Guam (5), and Tinian (1). Participants ranged in age from 18 to 76, with a median age of 47 years, and an inter-quartile range of 20 years. 37 participants reported that they had taken a previous experiment.

3.4 Experiment 2: Results

3.4.1 Responses to Antecedent Questions

We report our main results in terms of the percentage of reflexive possessor responses to the Antecedent Question. In these responses, the participant’s portrait choice identified the antecedent of the pronoun as a DP in the local clause. For the target conditions, these choices identified the Local Subject as antecedent, and for the passive controls, they identified the Passive Agent as antecedent. (We use the term reflexive in this experiment for the purposes of uniformity in reporting. The term is convenient but inaccurate for the passive controls; see below.) Table 4 reports these values along with coefficients from the logistic regressions. Here refl refers to reflexive possessor choices, and disj refers to choices of the Distant Subject as antecedent.

In the target conditions, the DP containing the possessor pronoun was the object of a transitive verb in the active voice. We found an overall preference to choose the local subject as the antecedent, but this Weak Locality Preference was a slight 57% (95% CrI: 50%–64%); results are given in Table 4 (top panel). Notably, it did not matter whether the local subject preceded or followed the pronoun, or whether the distant subject was in a higher clause or in an adverbial clause. The referent selection task thus gives prima facie evidence that the local subject enjoys some privilege as the antecedent of the possessor pronoun. However, any such privilege must be relatively weak and defeasible.

In the passive controls, the DP containing the possessor pronoun was the local subject, and the other DP in the local clause was the passive agent. Results for these conditions are in the bottom half of Table 4. Here, as expected, there was a strong preference against choosing the passive agent as the antecedent. On average, participants chose the passive agent 9% of the time (95% CrI: 6%–14%). Participants largely chose correctly, by selecting the distant subject as the antecedent. This was true whether the distant subject was in a higher clause and therefore a potential binder of the pronoun, or in a preceding adverbial clause and therefore a potential discourse antecedent for it. Interestingly, on the relatively few occasions when participants did choose the passive agent as the antecedent, there was a Linear Order Effect: these choices were made more often when the passive agent preceded the possessor pronoun than when the word order was the reverse (about 9% more often, 95% CrI: 4–15%).

The Linear Order Effect arguably adds support to the claim that (legal) binding is not involved when the passive agent is chosen as the antecedent, because binding in Chamorro is otherwise insensitive to the linear order. As for the possibility of discourse anaphora, a separate Chamorro restriction prevents the passive agent from serving as the discourse antecedent of a pronoun possessor of the subject. We therefore treat the responses in which the passive agent was chosen as the antecedent as errors. (In our data archive, we present a supplementary analysis of this effect.)

With these potential generalizations in hand – the Weak Locality Preference for reflexive interpretations in the target sentences, and the Linear Order Effect in the passive controls – we proceeded to a composite analysis that estimated two models: one for 16 items in the four Higher Clause conditions (2 targets, 2 controls), and the other for 16 items in the four Adverbial Clause conditions. This was intended to address the list distribution error described in Section 3.3. The results, given in Figure 5, cross-validate the initial generalizations, albeit with greater uncertainty. According to the composite analysis, the reflexive preference rate in the target sentences was 59% (95% CrI: 48%–69%) in Higher Clause items; and 62% (95% CrI: 49%–75%) in Adverbial Clause items. In the passive controls, a preceding Passive Agent increased the reflexive interpretation rate by 14% (95% CrI: 4%–24%) in the Higher Clause items; and 5% (95% CrI: –6%–18%) in Adverbial Clause items. Figure 5 visualizes these findings.

Figure 5

Experiment 2 antecedent choices (composite analysis). Main panel shows model estimates and 95% Credible Intervals for the eight sentence types in Experiment 2. Black symbols represent means over participants. Two separate models are represented: one for Distant Subject In Adverbial Clause conditions, and the other for Distant Subject In Higher Clause conditions. Density plots along the right margin show (combined) posterior distributions of the reflexive interpretation rate when Local Subject/Passive Agent Precedes Possessor (lighter) and when Local Subject/Passive Agent Follows Possessor (darker). Dashed line indicates 50%, or no preference for antecedent choice.

3.5 Experiment 2: Discussion

There were two main results from Experiment 2. The first is that comprehenders have a slight preference for the local subject as antecedent, but it is slight indeed. If we compare across the two experiments, we find that the preference for the local subject as antecedent in the active target conditions of Experiment 2 is comparable to the weakest preference for the local subject as antecedent shown in Experiment 1’s ambiguous Lcl Subj Pronoun conditions, i.e., when the verb required an animate Theme (Exp. 1: 62%, 95% CrI, 45%–76%; Exp. 2: 57%, 95% CrI, 50%–64%). Overall, we interpret this as evidence for a local antecedent advantage, albeit one qualified in strength and clearly defeasible in the face of other constraints.

The second result from Experiment 2 is the lack of convincing evidence that there is privilege for c-commanding antecedents over non-c-commanding antecedents – or, put another way, a preference for bound variable anaphora over discourse anaphora. Such evidence would come from a positive difference in reflexive interpretation rates between Adverbial Clause and Higher Clause conditions. The distant subject in the Higher Clause conditions c-commands the possessor pronoun, whereas the distant subject in Adverbial Clause conditions does not. If there were a preference for c-commanding antecedents over non-c-commanding antecedents, that should have rendered the distant subject a stronger competitor to the local subject in Higher Clause conditions, and we should have observed fewer choices of the local subject as antecedent in those conditions. (No such effect should have been observed in the Adverbial Clause conditions, given that the distant subject in those conditions does not c-command the possessor pronoun.) Average reflexive interpretation rates did conform to this prediction numerically: 58% in Adverbial Clause conditions v. 53% in Higher Clause conditions. However, the uncertainty around this difference reveals enough imprecision in the estimate to be circumspect (95% CrI, difference ranging from –3% to 14%). In a Bayes Factor analysis we directly compared the logistic regression reported above – which included Distant Subject as a factor – to a null model without it. This revealed moderate support for the null model (BF: 0.22).