Humanness, pronoun types, and orphan prepositions in French

Abstract

Abstract This paper is about the distribution of null and strong pronouns in French prepositional phrases in relation to the humanness of the preposition’s complement. The existing literature suggests that the mapping between pronoun type and humanness is characterized by soft complementarity, linking human complements to strong pronouns, and non-human complements to null pronouns. In the empirical coverage of the phenomenon experimental studies are still underrepresented: so far, no data on pronoun choice is available, and regarding interpretation data, the only existing study does not include null pronouns. Two experiments were conducted with the goal to fill this research gap. The results show that soft complementarity only applies to pronoun choice: human complements are typically referred to by strong pronouns, and non-human complements by null pronouns. As related to interpretation, however, both strong and null pronouns are preferably interpreted as human. We account for this asymmetry based on the general preference of pronouns to be interpreted as human unless prevented by strong constraints (as in the case of Engl. it).