Do perspective-sensitive anaphors and subjective adjectives exhibit perspectival uniformity? An experimental investigation

Abstract

Many kinds of linguistic expressions are perspective-sensitive, including predicates of personal taste and some anaphoric forms. This paper reports three experiments testing sentences like “Nora told/heard from Kimberly about the frightening photograph of her/herself”, with two perspective-sensitive elements. The studies investigate how perspectival factors – in particular, a referent’s status as a source or perceiver of information – guide interpretation of these two types of expressions and whether participants’ interpretation of whose opinion is expressed by a subjective adjective is linked to their interpretation of who is the antecedent of the reflexive or pronoun. The results replicate and extend earlier findings concerning the source/perceiver biases of reflexives and pronouns in picture-NPs, and also reveal a clear preference to interpret the attitude holder of PPTs as the individual who is the source of information (subject of ‘told’, object of ‘heard from’). However, the results fail to provide clear evidence for a systematic link between interpretation of the attitude-holders of PPTs on the one hand, and the antecedent of the pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs on the other. Consequences of these results for theories of PPTs, anaphor resolution and perspective-shifting are discussed.