Experiments in Linguistic Meaning

Although perspectival expressions are a diverse group, they share a common property: their meanings depend on the perspective of a discourse-given individual whose identity is under-specified. This paper investigates how perspective holder prominence is determined through a series of forced choice experiments on American English motion verbs exploring a number of discourse factors: definiteness, mention order, topicality, and subjecthood. The results suggest that both global and local prominence effects play a role in determining how perspectival motion verbs are interpreted.