Effects of clefting and left-dislocation on Subject and Object Pronoun Resolution in Spanish

The present study investigates the role of two syntactic constructions affecting the discourse status of antecedents (left-dislocation and clefting) in the intra-sentential resolution of ambiguous null subject and object clitic pronouns in Spanish. The results of two offline questionnaires show that pronoun interpretation changes significantly from a canonical construction as a result of the experimental manipulations of the discourse status of the antecedents. Crucially, however, the two syntactic constructions investigated do not have the same effect on participants' preferences: while there was a general preference for left-dislocated antecedents, participants dispreferred clefted antecedents at least intra-sententially, a pattern that has also been attested for subject pronoun resolution in French and German (Colonna et al., 2012). The differences between left-dislocation and clefting have been argued to be a consequence of a preference for topic continuity. It is suggested that the semantic and syntactic structure of clefts may provide a better explanation for our observations. A third questionnaire investigated experimental context effects on the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns.