Dialogue & Discourse 9(2) (2018) 1-34 doi: 10.5087/dad.2018.201

Asymmetries between interpretation and production in Catalan
pronouns

Laia Mayol LAIA.MAYOL@UPF.EDU

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Editor: Vera Demberg

Submitted 03/18; Accepted 11/18; Published online 12/18

Abstract
The literature on Romance null-subject languages has often postulated a division of labor between
Null and Overt pronouns: Nulls prefer to retrieve an antecedent in subject position, whereas Overts
prefer an antecedent in a lower syntactic position (Carminati, 2002). However, recent research
on English pronouns (Rohde and Kehler, 2014) has shown grammatical function alone cannot ex-
plain pronoun interpretation. According to this model, pronoun interpretation and production are
sensitive to different sets of factors and, instead of being mirror images of each other, are related
probabilistically in a Bayesian fashion. This paper tests this model with Catalan data from two
discourse-completion experiments to study the structural, grammatical factors and the semantico-
pragmatic factors that affect the interpretation and production of Null and Overt pronouns. Our
main result is that both Null and Overt pronouns present asymmetries regarding their interpretation
and production: (1) the production of Null pronouns is affected mainly by grammatical factors
(they are more likely to be used to refer to subjects), but their interpretation is also influenced by
semantico-pragmatic factors (rhetorical relations and the verb’s lexical semantics), and (2) while
Overt pronouns have a strong interpretation bias towards the object, they are not the preferred form
to refer to the object.

Keywords: pronouns, anaphora, null pronouns, overt pronouns, reference, rhetorical relations,
Catalan

1. Introduction

The production and interpretation of referring expressions is essential for successful communica-
tion: speakers need to choose one particular way to refer to the entities they want to talk about;
hearers need to assign a discourse referent to the referring expressions in a discourse. A long-
standing idea is that more reduced anaphoric expressions (such as pronouns) tend to be used for
more accessible referents, while more complex expressions will be used to refer to less accessi-
ble referents (Ariel, 1990; Givón, 1983; Gundel et al., 1993). This raises the question of which
specific factors contribute to accessibility, and whether the same factors drive both production and
interpretation.

A set of factors that are well-known to influence pronoun interpretations are structural, gram-
matical factors. In particular, subjects make particularly good antecedents (Crawley et al., 1990;
Arnold, 1999), as shown by (1), from Kehler et al. (2008). Although the semantic content of both
sentences is identical, the preferred antecedent of the pronoun changes: the preferred interpretation
of the pronoun is that it refers to the antecedent in subject position of the previous clause.

c©2018 Laia Mayol

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License
(http ://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).



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(1) a. Bush narrowly defeated Kerry, and special interests promptly began lobbying him.
[him=Bush]

b. Kerry was narrowly defeated by Bush, and special interests promptly began lobbying
him. [him=Kerry]

However, in other occasions, structural factors are overridden by semantico-pragmatic factors
and the subject preference is not observed, as illustrated by the minimal pairs in (2). While we still
observe a subject preference for (2-a), it disappears in (2-b). This difference is partly due to the
verb type: both apologize and scold are so-called implicit causality verbs (Caramazza et al., 1977;
Brown and Fish, 1983; Stevenson et al., 1994) which attribute the cause of the event to one of the
two referents (the subject in the case of apologize, the object in the case of scold). This is precisely
the referent to which the pronoun is more likely to refer. These semantic biases are in force in
restricted discourse conditions, in particular when the second sentence gives a cause for the event in
the first sentence (i.e. when there is a rhetorical relation of Explanation between the two sentences).
A different rhetorical relation may create a different bias, as shown in (2-c), in which the event of
the second sentence follows the event of the first sentence and a narration is established.

(2) a. Mike apologized to Joe because he was late.[he=Mike]
b. Mike scolded Joe because he was late. [he=Joe]
c. Mike scolded Joe and then he left. [he=Mike]

Rohde and Kehler (2014) present a model which aims to capture both structural and (non-structural)
semantico-pragmatic factors. In their model, semantico-pragmatic factors (including verb type or
rhetorical relations) affect only pronoun interpretation, while structural factors affect both pronoun
interpretation and production. Thus interpretation and production are fundamentally asymmetrical
and this asymmetry can be modeled using Bayes’ Rules (see Section 2.3 for a more full-fledged
explanation).

While some research has been devoted to study how structural and semantico-pragmatic factors
interact in languages such as English, Romance languages such as Catalan, the language under
study in this paper, have an additional aspect to consider given their dual system of pronominal
forms: these languages have both overt and null pronouns (Rigau, 1986). Moreover, the interaction
of structural and semantico-pragmatic factors has not been thoroughly studied for either of the two
types of pronouns. This paper aims to fill this gap and answer the following questions: 1) How do the
structural and semantico-pragmatic factors affect both null and overt pronouns (Nulls and Overts,
henceforth) in Catalan? 2) Can the behavior of Nulls and Overts be modeled by a probabilistic
model such as the one proposed by Rohde and Kehler (2014)?

This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the relevant background on pronoun
interpretation and production. Sections 3 and 4 present two discourse-completion studies whose
aim is to study the production and interpretation of pronouns in Catalan. The quantitative data
that emerges from these experiments are useful to describe how the two pronouns are used and
understood and, moreover, gives us the necessary information to put the probabilistic model to a
test. Finally, section 5 ends the article with some conclusions.

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

2. Background

2.1 Effect of grammatical factors on pronoun interpretation

As mentioned in the introduction, it has recurrently been proposed in the literature that grammatical
factors affect the interpretation of pronouns: that is, the grammatical function of a referent can
make it a more or less likely antecedent for a pronoun. Particularly well-studied is the Subject-
Assignment Strategy (Crawley et al., 1990), which postulates that a referent mentioned in subject
position becomes a more likely antecedent for a pronoun than referents in other syntactic positions.

The literature on Romance language has used this idea to explain the interpretation of Nulls
and Overts, and many studies have postulated a division of labor between both types of forms. For
instance, in several corpus studies, it has been found that Nulls and Overts carry different biases: a
null pronoun prefers a subject antecedent, and an overt pronoun a non-subject antecedent (Cameron,
1992; Silva-Corvalán, 1977). Carminati (2002) called this asymmetry the Position of Antecedent
Hypothesis (PAH), as defined in (3).

(3) Position of Antecedent Hypothesis: Nulls prefer to retrieve an antecedent in the highest
subject position, whereas Overts prefer an antecedent in a lower syntactic position.

Carminati found support for the PAH in questionnaire and reading-time experiments for Italian. In
her Experiment 1, participants were presented with two-sentence discourses, in which the second
sentence contained a potentially ambiguous Null (see (4-a)) or Overt (see (4-b)). Then they had to
answer a question about the referent of such pronoun (4-c). She found clear opposed biases between
Null and Overts: Nulls pronouns preferred to retrieve the antecedent in subject position (‘Marta’ in
the examples), and Overts the antecedents in object position (‘Piera’ in the examples).

(4) a. Marta scriveva frequentemente a Piera quando ∅ era negli Stati Uniti.
“Marta wrote frequently to Piera when ∅ was in the United States.”

b. Marta scriveva frequentemente a Piera quando lei era negli Stati Uniti.
“Marta wrote frequently to Piera when she was in the United States.”

c. Who was in the States?

Support for the PAH has also been found for other Romance languages such as Spanish (Alonso-
Ovalle et al., 2002; Keating et al., 2016) and Catalan (Mayol and Clark, 2010).1 Other researchers
have proposed that the asymmetry should not be cast in syntactic terms, but in information-structural
terms, such that Nulls tend to indicate topic continuity, and Overts indicate topic change (Vallduvı́
(1992) for Catalan, Samek-Lodovici (1996) and DiEugenio (1998) for Italian). Both theories make
the same predictions in most cases, given that the referent in the subject position is usually also the
topic, but would differ in the cases in which the topic is realized by another grammatical function.
In some previous work (Mayol, 2010b), I showed that the syntactic preferences of Nulls are not a
byproduct of their informational structure preferences, but that the two levels interact and the PAH
needs to be refined in order to capture the pronouns’ preferences. Nulls have a simple preference

1. As an anonymous reviewer points out, the support for the PAH in Alonso-Ovalle et al. (2002) is only partial: while
Nulls displayed a strong subject preference, Overts did not have a strong bias to either antecedent.

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for subject antecedents, regardless of whether they are topics or not. Overts have a more complex
preference for low-salience (non-subject, non-topics) antecedents.2

Another important difference that has been pointed out in the literature between the two types
of pronouns in Romance languages is that Overts often carry a contrastive flavor, absent in Nulls.
This has lead some authors to treat Overts as a counterpart to stressed pronouns in languages like
English, and to account for their use as ways to encode Focus (Luján, 1985, 1999) or Contrastive
Topics (Mayol, 2010a).

Having briefly examined the role of grammatical factors in pronominal references, let us now
turn to the less-studied effect of semantico-pragmatic factors.

2.2 Effect of semantico-pragmatic on the interpretation of pronouns

In the last decade it has become clear that grammatical factors alone cannot explain pronoun in-
terpretation. Take for instance, example (5) (which extends example (1) discussed above). (5-a)
and (5-b), as mentioned, have been used to argue for the Subject-Assignment Strategy, since the
use of the active or passive voice alters the referent assignment. However, why is this strategy not
active in (5-c)? In order to account for cases like this, it has been proposed that pronouns refer
to an antecedent with the same grammatical function (Smyth, 1994): a subject pronoun would be
biased to a subject antecedent, and an object pronoun to an object antecedent. Unfortunately, this
hypothesis cannot account for (5-d), in which a subject pronoun is interpreted as referring to the
previous object.

(5) a. Bush narrowly defeated Kerry, and special interests promptly began lobbying him.
[him=Bush]

b. Kerry was narrowly defeated by Bush, and special interests promptly began lobbying
him. [him=Kerry]

c. Bush narrowly defeated Kerry, and Romney absolutely trounced him.[him=Kerry]
d. Bush narrowly defeated Kerry and he quickly demanded a recount. [him=Kerry]

Kehler (2002) notices that the rhetorical relations involved in (5) are not the same and argues
that rhetorical relations affect pronoun interpretation. Examples (5-a) and (5-b) are examples of
Occasions. The rhetorical relation of Occasion allows a speaker to signal a narration event, in
which a set of events are temporally ordered: the initial state of the second sentence is equated with
the final state of the first one. Thus, in an Occasion relation, the most salient referents at the end state
of the first utterance become likely antecedents for upcoming pronouns. The most salient referent
will be the topic of the sentence (the referent about which the sentence is about), which typically
corresponds to the subject. Hence, many pronouns appearing in Occasion relations are subject-
biased. That is, the discourse in (5-a) is about what Bush did and so the pronoun refers to him.
Similarly (5-b) is about what Kerry did, so the pronoun refers to him. In contrast, the discourses in
(5-c) and (5-d) are not Occasions. (5-c) is a case of Parallel, in which commonalities and differences
between entities are highlighted: both sentences express a similar eventuality in which either Bush
or Romney defeat Kerry and, thus, the pronoun is naturally assigned to the previous object. Finally,
(5-d) is a Result and, therefore, a causal link is established between the two sentences, so that the
second sentence expresses a consequence of the first. Our world-knowledge pushes the antecedent

2. Since the two types of categories (syntactic and informational) largely overlap, this work will focus on the study of
syntactic functions.

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

assignment to the object, given that it is the one who loses an election the one who typically demands
a recount.3

The conclusion from the previous discussion is that rhetorical relations greatly affect pronoun
interpretation and come with their own biases. Moreover, rhetorical relations often interact with
other semantic factors, such as verb type. This was partially illustrated in example (2) with implicit
causality verbs: some verbs carry their own biases in cases of Explanation (when the event in the
second utterance explains why the event of the first utterance occurred). Another well-studied se-
mantic class of verbs is the transfer of possession verbs (TPV, henceforth), such as ‘give’, which
express the event of an object being transferred from a Source argument to a Goal argument (Steven-
son et al., 1994; Arnold, 2001; Kehler et al., 2008; Rosa and Arnold, 2017). Both the Source and
the Goal can function as subjects or objects depending on the verb, as illustrated in (6). Previous re-
search (Stevenson et al., 1994; Arnold, 2001) used the discourse-completion paradigm and showed
that Goal referents are more accessible, particularly when they are in subject position (6-a), while
the bias is milder when the Goal is not the subject (6-b).

(6) a. Bob received a book from Peter. He ...
b. Peter handed a book to Bob. He ...

Kehler et al. (2008) replicated this finding: in items in which the Goal was not the subject (as in
(7-b)), the pronoun did not show a clear interpretation bias (half of the time participants used the
pronoun to refer to Peter; the other half to refer to Bob). However, once the data was grouped
by rhetorical relations very clear patterns emerged: Occasions and Results were clearly biased to
the non-subject, while Elaborations (a relation in which both sentences describe the same event)
and Explanations were clearly biased towards the subject. Why should this be so? As mentioned,
pronouns occurring in an Occasion relation are biased towards the most salient referent at the end
state of the event in the first utterance, because in an Occasion the events are temporally ordered: the
end state of the first event is followed by another event, so whatever referent is salient at the end of
the first event is likely to be picked up again in subsequent events. While this referent is usually the
subject, Kehler et. al. (2008), propose that in a context with a TPV, the Goal argument is the most
salient one, since it is the one in focus at the end of the event. That is, if the speaker is narrating
a series of events and she mentions that Peter handed a book to Bob, a very likely way to continue
the discourse would be to explain what Bob did with the book: by the end of the first sentence, the
most salient referent is Bob. The strong non-subject bias of the Result relation can be explained in
similar terms: if the speakers wants to talk about the consequences of Peter giving a book to Bob,
she will probably continue talking about Bob. In contrast, other relations do not focus on the end
state of the event in the first utterance: for instance, Elaboration and Explanations. These relations
will be biased towards the subject. For instance, if the speakers want to elaborate on how or why
the handing took place, she will probably continue talking about Peter and not about Bob. Thus, we
can conclude that rhetorical relations are biased towards a particular discourse referent: in the case
of a TPV context, Elaborations and Explanations are biased towards the subject, and Occasions and
Results are biased towards the non-subject.

Another semantico-pragmatic factor that has been shown to influence pronoun interpretation
is the aforementioned verbs’ implicit causality. Implicit causality verbs (ICVs) have been used

3. An anonymous reviewer points out that, although the pronoun can be coerced to refer to the object, s/he finds (5-d)
fairly unnatural. See section 2.3 for more discussion on the interaction between structural and pragmatic factors.

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recurrently to study the role of semantic factors in the interpretation of pronouns (Caramazza et al.,
1977; Brown and Fish, 1983; Fukumura and Van Gompel, 2010; Rohde and Kehler, 2014). ICVs
attribute the cause of the event they denote either to the subject (ICV1s, henceforth) or to the object
(ICV2s, henceforth)4, and, therefore, impose different biases on the pronouns that follow them.
For instance, the verb ‘surprise’ is an ICV1 and, therefore, (7-a) will more likely be interpreted as
conveying that it was Anne, the subject, who aced the exam and that this this surprised Mary. In
contrast, ‘congratulate’ is an ICV2, and (7-b) will more likely be interpreted as conveying that it
was Mary, the object, who aced the exam and that is why Anne congratulated her.

(7) a. Anne surprised Mary because she aced the math exam.
b. Anne congratulated Mary because she aced the math exam.

2.3 Relationship between interpretation and production

There is a current debate in the literature about the relationship between interpretation and produc-
tion, and particularly about whether interpretation and production are affected by the same set of
factors. In particular, the discussion revolves around whether the semantico-pragmatic factors that
affect pronoun interpretation (see previous section) also shape production. On the one hand, Arnold
(1998, 2001) has argued that both interpretation and production are affected by semantico-pragmatic
factors. This idea is captured by her Expectancy Hypothesis, according to which more accessible
entities are more likely to be mentioned again in discourse, which in turn increases their probability
of being pronominalized. This hypothesis has been tested with transfer of possession verbs (Arnold,
2001; Rosa and Arnold, 2017): in these studies, participants used pronouns more often to refer to
the Goal than to refer to the Source. The effect was particularly strong for non-subjects; in contrast,
it was either weak or non-existent for subjects (in Arnold (2001) and in experiments 2 and 3 in Rosa
and Arnold (2017)). On the other hand, other studies have found that semantic-pragmatic factors did
not affect the choice of anaphoric form. Fukumura and van Gompel (2010) used implicit causality
verbs and found that the rate of pronominalization towards either of the arguments was constant
regardless of whether the verb was biased to the subject or the object. A similar finding is reported
in Rohde and Kehler (2014).

Rohde and Kehler (Rohde and Kehler, 2014; Kehler and Rohde, 2013) have argued for a model
in which pronoun production and interpretation are not mirror images of each other, but are sensitive
to different factors. This could explain an interesting asymmetry found in the discourse-completion
study by Stevenson et al. (1994). As mentioned, when participants were forced to continue with
a pronoun, as in (8-a), it was not clearly biased towards either of the antecedents. In contrast,
when they could choose which referring expression to use to continue the discourse, as in (8-b),
participants mostly used a pronoun to refer to the subject and a name to refer to the object.

(8) a. Peter handed a book to Bob. He ...
b. Peter handed a book to Bob.

If speakers mostly use a pronoun to refer to the subject, why doesn’t the pronoun display a stronger
subject preference? The answer in Rohde and Kehler (2014) is that pronoun production and inter-

4. Fukumura and Van Gompel (2010) use the terminology ‘stimulus-experiencer (SE)’ and ‘experiencer-stimulus (ES)’.
I will use the more neutral ICV1 and ICV2, given that some of the arguments of the verbs I will use are not either
stimuli or experiencers, but rather agents and themes, like for instance the arguments of the verb congratulate in (7b).

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

pretation are not mirror images of each other, but are sensitive to different factors. In particular,
while pronoun interpretation is affected by both structural and semantico-pragmatic factors, pro-
noun production is not affected by the latter. This explains the asymmetry in the two conditions
of Stevenson et al. (1994): although speakers mostly use pronouns to refer to the previous subject,
hearers can easily assign a pronoun to the non-subject if the semantico-pragmatic factors (i.e. the
context, rhetorical relation or the verb’s implicit causality, for instance) push in that direction.

Rohde and Kehler (2014) show that, although this asymmetry between production and inter-
pretation may not be intuitive, it is, in fact, expected if production and interpretation are related
probabilistically, through Bayes’ Rule, illustrated in (9).

(9)

P(referent | pronoun) = P(pronoun | referent)P(referent)

P(pronoun)

The term in the left-hand side, P(referent | pronoun), is the probability to refer to a particular
referent given that a pronoun has been used. It, thus, represents the point of view of the interpreter:
he has heard a pronoun and needs to assign it a referent. The term P(pronoun | referent), in
contrast, represents the point of view of the speaker: given that she wants to refer to a particular
referent, should she use a pronoun? The crucial point is that these two probabilities are not mirror
images of each other, given that a third probability plays a role: P(referent). This is the probability
that a particular referent will be mentioned regardless of the form.5

The production bias, P(pronoun | referent), is basically affected only by grammatical factors:
i.e. there is a production bias towards pronominalizing the previous subject referent. In contrast,
the interpretation bias is affected both by the grammatical factors that affect the production bias and
the factors that affect whether a particular referent will be mentioned next (i.e. P(referent)). The
latter factors are predicted not to affect production.

Rohde and Kehler (2014) showed how this model can explain the behavior of pronouns in En-
glish in a variety of contexts and that it is superior to other models: (i) the one they call Expectancy
model (after the Expectancy Hypothesis in Arnold (1999)), which assumes that the interpretation
bias of a pronoun towards a referent (that is, P(referent | pronoun)) is the probability that the ref-
erent is mentioned again (P(referent)) and (ii) the one they call Mirror Model, which assumes that
the bias of a pronoun towards a referent is the probability that such referent will be pronominalized
(P(pronoun | referent)).

One of the goals of this paper is to examine whether this model can accurately account for the
behavior of Nulls and Overts in Catalan. To this end, two discourse-completion studies were carried
out. In both experiments, the context sentence contains a verb which manipulates the context in a
particular way: Experiment 1 uses transfer of possession verbs and Experiment 2 implicit causality
verbs. The reasons for this choice were two-fold: first, each verb type is expected to interact with
rhetorical relations in a particular way and, second, since they have been studied extensively, we
will be able to compare our results with previous research.

5. The denominator, P (pronoun), is the probability that a pronoun is used and can be computed by summing the
terms in the numerator by all possible referents (subject and object). This term contributes a constant factor which
normalizes the values so that they are probabilities and, therefore, sum to 1. It will not be discussed further in the rest
of the paper.

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3. Experiment 1: transfer of possession verbs

Experiment 1 is a discourse-completion study in which the context sentence used TPVs, which, as
mentioned, usually trigger many continuations about the Goal argument. In particular, only verbs
that locate the Goal in indirect object6 position are used so that the typical biases are reversed and
we obtain a context biased towards the object. This atypical context is useful to study the interaction
between grammatical and semantico-pragmatic factors.

3.1 Methods

Materials
This experiment replicates in Catalan the aforementioned experiments in Stevenson et al. (1994)
and Kehler et al. (2008), including a condition for the overt pronoun. Thus, the experiment has
three conditions, as can be seen in (10):

(10) a. Condition 1: Null prompt.
El Pere li va passar un llibre al Robert. ∅ ...
Peter passed a book to Robert. ∅ ...

b. Condition 2: Overt prompt.
El Pere li va passar un llibre al Robert. Ell ...
Peter passed a book to Robert. He ...

c. Condition 3: Free prompt.
El Pere li va passar un llibre al Robert. ...
Peter passed a book to Robert. ...

The first two conditions will provide interpretation data for Nulls and Overts respectively: partici-
pants will need to interpret the pronouns and provide a completion coherent with their interpretation.
The last condition (‘Free condition’, henceforth) will provide production data, since participants are
free to choose whatever form they deem appropriate for the subject position of the completion.

The experiment included 18 critical items, all containing a TPV. In each sentence, two referents
of the same gender were mentioned; half of the items contained two male proper names and the
other half two female proper names. The source of the transfer event always appeared in subject
position, the goal appeared as the indirect object, and the transferred object as the direct object.
Three lists were built, so that each participant only saw each item in one of the conditions. Each
list also contained 18 fillers, with non-TPVs and with prompts containing a connector or a temporal
expression. The full list of critical items with their English translations can be seen in Appendix 1.

Based on the previous literature, we formulate the following hypotheses:

1. Nulls are expected to receive more subject interpretations than Overts.

2. Type of prompt is expected to affect rhetorical relations. If indeed Nulls trigger more subject
interpretations, we expect more subject-biased rhetorical relations (Explanation and Elabora-
tion) in the Null condition than in the Overt condition.

3. Pronoun interpretation is expected to be affected by rhetorical relations. We expect Occasions
and Results to be highly object-biased and Elaboration and Explanation to be subject-biased.

6. In this section, whenever I use the label ‘object’ I am referring to the indirect object.

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

4. Pronoun production is not expected to be affected by rhetorical relations. In the Free con-
dition, the rate of Nulls for a particular referent is expected to be consistent across different
rhetorical relations.

Procedure
The data was collected in an online survey site (https:app.surveygizmo.eu). First, the participants
read the instructions in which the procedure was explained. Then, each item was presented once at
a time and the participants were asked to write a single, complete sentence as a completion. They
were told to write the first completion that came to mind, avoiding humor.

One of the difficulties of working with a Null prompt is that participants needed to understand
what a Null is. In order to achieve this, the instructions contained a brief informal explanation.
The instructions explained the difference between a null subject and an overt subject (expressed by
means of a pronoun or another phrase) and contained examples of each type of subject. There were
several examples in which the Null referred both to the previous subject or to the previous object,
in order not to bias the participants.

Participants
Ninety participants took part in the experiment. They were all native speakers of Catalan and stu-
dents at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. They were entered in a raffle to win a gift certificate.

3.2 Results

A total of 1620 completions (18 items * 90 participants) were collected. Two judges, the author
of the paper and a linguistics graduate student at UPF, coded the antecedent of the subject of the
completion into one of the following categories: Subject (if it referred to the Source), Object (if it
referred to the Goal), Joint (plural reference to both the Subject and the Object), Other (if it referred
to the transferred object or to something else) or Unsure (if the pronoun could be understood as
referring to more than one referent).

The results reported in this paper concern a subset of the collected 1620 completions, specifi-
cally those in which both judges agreed that the subject of the completion unambiguously referred
to either the Subject or the Object. We exclude from the analysis those completions in which the
judges disagreed about the coding, or the completions coded as Join, Other and Unsure. Also dis-
carded are the completions in which a Null was not used in the Null condition (1.3% (n=23) of
the data). I take this low percentage as evidence that participants understood what a Null is. In
total, 1098 completions were analyzed. These completions were further coded according to (i) the
rhetorical relation between the two sentences and (ii) what type of referring expression was used in
subject position in the Free condition: Null, Overt, proper name, etc. In this case, any disagreement
was individually discussed and the judges agreed on a decision.

(11) summarizes the typology of rhetorical relations assumed in the paper (adapted from Kehler
and Rohde (2013)):

(11) a. Explanation: Infer that the second sentence describes a cause for the eventuality de-
scribed in the first sentence.
“John handed a book to Bob. He no longer had a use for it.”

b. Elaboration: Infer that both sentences provide descriptions of the same eventuality.
“John handed a book to Bob. He did so slowly and carefully.”

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c. Occasion: Infer a change of state from the second sentence, taking its initial state to
be the final state of the eventuality described in the first sentence.
“John handed a book to Bob. He began reading it.”

d. Result: Infer that the first sentence describes a cause or reason for the eventuality
described in the second sentence.
“John handed a book to Bob. He thanked him for the gift.”

e. Violated Expectation: Infer that the second sentence describes an unexpected result of
the eventuality described in the first sentence.
“John handed a book to Bob. He showed no interest in reading it.”

f. Parallel: Infer that the first and second sentences express similar eventualities, as if
each provides a partial answer to a common question.
“John handed a book to Bob. He gave a magazine to him as well.”

To test for the statistical significance of the results, mixed-effect logistic regressions were per-
formed, using R (R Core Team, 2013) and lme4 (Bates et al., 2015). All models contained items and
participants as random effects. Unless otherwise noted, the models also contained random slopes
for all predictors and interactions (Barr et al., 2013). In case of non-converging models, the random
effects structure was simplified, as specified for each individual model. Likelihood ratio tests are
used to compare mixed-effects models different only in the presence or absence of the fixed effect
in question. In the models with Prompt, which is a 3-level predictor, as a fixed effect, Free is treated
as the baseline. In addition, we use pairwise comparisons and report the coefficient estimates (β
estimates) and p-value for each combination.

Figure 1: Subject and Object continuations by Prompt

Figure 1 shows the percentage of subject and object reference in the three prompt conditions. In
the three conditions we find an object bias, which is milder in the Null condition (62%), and greater
in the Free (76%) and, particularly, Overt conditions (90%). To test for a main effect of prompt, a
likelihood-ratio test was conducted between mixed-effects models different only in the presence or
absence of a fixed main effect of prompt (see more details about the non-reduced model in Appendix
2, table 7). In both models, pronoun reference (subjects vs. object) was the dependent variable. The
likelihood-ratio test showed a main effect of prompt (χ2 = 105.99, p< .001). Pairwise comparisons
shows that the differences are significant in all three combinations: Free-Null (β = -1.04, p< .001),

10



ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

Free-Overt (β = 1.20, p= .006) and Null-Overt (β = 2.25, p< .001). Thus, Hypothesis 1 is borne out:
Nulls are more subject-biased than Overts, although overall both are object-biased in this context.

Figure 2 breaks down the data of the Free condition, showing the subject and object bias of
those completions in which participants chose to use either a Null or an Overt. We can observe
that the results in figures 1 and 2 are comparable: while Overts display a strong bias towards the
object (87%), Nulls show a much milder bias (57%). We compared two models in which pronoun
reference (subject vs. object) was the dependent variable and which differed only in the presence or
absence of a fixed main effect of pronoun type. A likelihood-ratio test showed the effect of pronoun
type is significant (χ2 = 23.90, p< .001).

Figure 2: Subject and Object continuations by pronoun type in the Free condition

Figure 3: Distribution of referring expressions in the Free condition

Let us now examine what kind of referring expressions participants chose in the Free condition
to refer to the previous subject and object. The data is summarized in figure 3.7 For the subject,
the preferred form is the Null (72%) followed by a proper name (22%). For the object, the reverse
order is found (30% of Nulls and 56% of proper names). The Overt pronoun is only the third
most used form for both cases, accounting for only between 7% and 14% of the data. To test for

7. We exclude from the analysis the cases in which other forms, such as noun phrases or demonstratives were used,
which accounted for less than 5% of the data.

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the statistical significance of the data, we grouped the data in two binary categories: (i) choice of
Null vs. not-Null as a referring expression and (ii) choice of name vs. not-name as a referring
expression. We compared two models in which referring expression (Null vs. not-Null) was the
dependent variable and which differed only in the presence or absence of a fixed main effect of
pronoun reference (subject vs. object) (see more details about the non-reduced model in Appendix
2, table 8). A likelihood-ratio test showed the effect of pronoun reference is significant (χ2 = 63.44,
p< .001). We further compared two models in which referring expression (name vs. not-name) was
the dependent variable and which differed only in the presence or absence of a fixed main effect of
pronoun reference (subject vs. object) (see more details about the non-reduced model in Appendix
2, table 9). A likelihood-ratio test showed that the effect of pronoun reference is significant (χ2 =
63.63, p< .001).

The asymmetry between interpretation and production observed by English has been replicated
in the Catalan data for Nulls. Although Nulls displayed a mild interpretation bias towards the object,
they display a very strong production bias towards the subject. When participants could choose a
form to refer to the subject, they overwhelmingly chose a null pronoun. However, when they had
to interpret a pronoun, the pragmatic biases came into play and overwhelmed the production bias.
Given that it was more likely that the object (and not the subject) was mentioned next, the pronoun
was interpreted with an object bias. In the next section, I discuss how this data fits in the Bayesian
model proposed by Rohde and Kehler (2014).

The data has also uncovered another asymmetry concerning Overts. Although interpreters have
a very strong bias to interpret the overt pronoun as referring to the object, it is clearly not the
preferred form to refer to the object. More discussion of this asymmetry is postponed to section 3.4.

Let us now examine the effect of rhetorical relations. First, table 1 shows the distribution of
rhetorical relations in each condition. We can take the results of the Free condition as the neutral
results for TPV contexts: that is, as an estimate of which kind of rhetorical relations we are mostly
likely to encounter after a TPV context. The data shows that, in a TPV context, we can expect a fair
share of Occasions and Explanations, followed by Results, Elaborations and Violated Expectations.8

Now, observe how forcing participants to use either a Null or an Overt causes a switch in the
percentage of observed rhetorical relations. Null prompts cause a rise of the rhetorical relations
with subject bias, Elaboration and Explanation, and a decrease of the rhetorical relations with object
bias, Occasion and Result. The opposite result is found for Overts.

Free Null Overt
Explanation 25 33 17
Elaboration 18 32 9
Occasion 27 15 46
Result 15 10 20
Violated Expectation 12 9 6
Parallelism 3 1 2
Total 100 100 100

Table 1: % rhetorical relations by Prompt.

8. Since Parallelism occurred very rarely, it will not be discussed further.

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

Figure 4: Distribution of rhetorical relations by Prompt

In order to see the pattern more clearly, rhetorical relations can be grouped in two categories:
subject-biased relations, which include Elaboration and Explanation, and object-biased relations,
which include Result and Occasion. Figure 4 shows the distribution of these two categories by
prompt. While in the Free condition, subject and object-biased relations are evenly split, Nulls
clearly favor subject-biased relations and Overts clearly favor object-biased relations.

In order to test for statistical significance, two models were compared in which rhetorical re-
lation bias (subject-biased vs. object-biased, as described above) was the dependent variable and
which differed only in the presence or absence of a fixed main effect of prompt type (Null, Overt,
Free) (see more details about the non-reduced model in Appendix 2, table 10). A likelihood-ratio
test showed the effect of prompt type is significant (χ2 = 142.92, p< .001). Pairwise comparisons
shows that the differences are significant in all three combinations: Free-Null (β = 0.95, p< .001),
Free-Overt (β = -1.30, p< .001) and Null-Overt (β = -2.25, p< .001). Thus, hypothesis 2 is also
borne out: type of prompt affects the distribution of rhetorical relations.

Figure 5: Subject continuations by rhetorical relation bias and pronoun type

Let us now turn to the question of whether pronoun interpretation is affected by rhetorical re-
lations. Figure 5 shows the proportion of continuation about the subject by rhetorical relation bias
in Conditions 1 and 2 (with Nulls and Overts). It can again be seen how rhetorical relations greatly
affect the percentage of subject bias and the split between subject and object-biased relationships.

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Object-biased relations show almost no reference to the subject, regardless of whether we find a
Null or an Overt. In contrast, Subject-biased relations show a greater proportion of continuations
about the subject.

Two models were compared in which pronoun reference was the dependent variable and which
differed only in the presence or absence of a fixed main effect of rhetorical relation bias (subject-
biased vs. object-biased) (see more details about the non-reduced model in Appendix 2, table 11).
A likelihood-ratio test showed the effect of rhetorical relation is significant (χ2 = 350.12, p< .001).
Hypothesis 3 is borne out: pronoun interpretation is affected by rhetorical relations.

While the results of object-biased relations is very homogenous, it is worth taking a closer look
at the data for subject-biased relations. Table 2 summarizes the proportion of continuation about
the subject in Explanation and Elaboration by pronoun type. While Elaborations shows a high
percentage of subject references, the behavior of Explanation is somewhat unexpected. Although
the proportion of subject continuations is higher than for object-biased relations, it is not clearly
subject-biased either. This unexpected result will be discussed in section 3.4.

Null Overt
Explanation 29 32
Elaboration 72 50

Table 2: Proportion of continuations about the subject in Explanations and Elaborations by pronoun
type

The results so far have confirmed that pragmatic factors affect pronoun interpretation. That
is, pronouns biases are different across different rhetorical relations. For instance, Nulls are mostly
interpreted as referring to the subject in cases of Elaborations, while they are interpreted as referring
to the object in cases of Occasions. Now, we should take a look at the production data. Remember
that the hypothesis is that the pronouns biases for a particular referent should be similar across
different rhetorical relations. Figure 6 shows the percentage of Nulls referring to the subject in three
rhetorical relations.9

We compared two models in which referring expression (Null Pronoun vs. No Pronoun) was
the dependent variable and which differed only in the presence or absence of a fixed main effect of
rhetorical relation (Elaboration being the baseline; see more details about the non-reduced model
in Appendix 2, table 12). A likelihood-ratio test showed the effect of rhetorical relation is not
significant (χ2 = 0.25, p= .88). Thus, hypothesis 4 is borne out: the production of Nulls remains
constant and it is not affected by whether the rhetorical relation is subject biased or not.

3.3 Applying the Bayesian model

Let us now examine the predictions of the Bayesian model, presented in Section 2.3. In partic-
ular, we will examine the production and interpretation of the null pronoun to refer to a subject
antecedent.10 We can, thus, rewrite the equation in (9) as (12).

9. We only present the cases in which there were at least 10 data points per rhetorical relation, which was not the case
for Result, Violated Expectation and Parallelism.

10. An analysis for the overt pronoun will not be presented. There are not enough data points for a reliable estimation,
given that it was scarcely produced in the Free conditions

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

Figure 6: Proportion of nulls referring to the subject by rhetorical relation

(12)

P (subject | null) = P (null | subject)P (subject)
P (null)

All these parameters can be estimated using data from the discourse-completion study. First,
P (subject | null) is the probability that, given that a null pronoun has been used, it will be in-
terpreted as referring to the subject. This probability, which can be estimated using the data of the
Null condition, is 0.38 (see figure 1). Second, the reverse probability, P (null | subject), is the
probability that a null pronoun will be used given that the referent is the subject. This probability,
which can be estimated using data from the Free condition, is 0.72 (see figure 3). Third, the overall
probability that the subject is the referent (regardless of the form used) is 0.24 (estimated using
data from the Free condition, see figure 1). Finally, the denominator is the probability that a null
pronoun is used, which can be calculated by summing the terms in the numerator by all possible
referents (in this case subject and object). All the parameters are summarized in (13). The predicted
probability is 0.44, not far from the observed probability (0.38). In order to test whether the correla-
tion between observed and predicted probabilities is statistically significant we carried out a linear
regression test over item means (that is, we computed the mean observed and predicted probabilities
for each item).11 The correlation is significant (adjusted R2= 0.40, p= .007).

(13) a. Observed P (subject | null) = 0.38
b. P (null | subject) = 0.72
c. P (subject)= 0.24
d. P (null) = P (null | subject) ∗ P (subject) + P (null | object) ∗ P (object) = 0.40
e. Predicted P (subject | null)= 0.43

The Bayesian account outperforms other models, such as the Mirror Model, which equatesP (subject |
null) with the probability that a null is used given that the referent is the subject (P (subject | null),
or the Expectancy model, which equates P (subject | null) with the probability that the subject is
named again (P (subject)). In the case of the Mirror Model the correlation is not significant (ad-

11. We excluded items for which in the Free condition participants did not refer to one of the two referents. That was the
case for 1 of the 18 items.

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justedR2= -0.06, p= .71); in the case of the Expectancy Model the correlation is significant (adjusted
R2= 0.37, p= .009), but slightly lower than the one obtained with the Bayesian model.

3.4 Discussion

Experiment 1 mostly confirms the model by Kehler and Rohde (2014) about the role of rhetorical
relations. Different pronoun prompts raise or lower the probability of particular rhetorical relations,
which in turn carry their own interpretation biases. For instance, Occasion and Result are strongly
object-biased and Elaboration is subject-biased. In contrast, pronoun production is not affected
by such pragmatic factors: the rate of pronominalization is similar in Occasion and Elaboration,
although they display opposite interpretation biases.

One of the results that does not fit precisely with their account is the low percentage of subject
references with a null pronoun in the case of Explanation, which was only 29%. If Explanation is
subject-biased and Nulls are subject-biased, why do 71% of Nulls in Explanation refer to objects?
I believe the answer is that two different types of explanations are in play for subject and object
references. (14) shows some examples of subject-referring explanations, while (15) shows some
examples of object-referring explanations.

(14) a. L’Elena
The Elena

li
DAT

va regalar
gave

un
a

llibre
book

a
to

la
the

Mercè.
Mercè.

∅
∅

Sap
Knows

que
that

li
DAT

encanten
please

aquesta
this

mena
kind

de
of

regals.
gifts.

‘Elena gave a book to Mercè. (She) knows she adores this kind of gift.’
b. El

The
Joan
Joan

va donar
gave

una
a

joguina
toy

a
to

l’Enric.
the Enric.

∅
∅

va preferir
preferred

cedir
to give in

abans
before

que
that

barallar-se
fight

un
one

altre
other

cop.
time

‘Joan gave a toy to Enric. (He) preferred to give in rather than getting into a fight
again.

(15) a. El
The

Pere
Pere

li
DAT

va passar
passed

la
the

clau
key

anglesa
English

al
to the

Marc.
Marc.

∅
∅

La
it

necessitava
needed

per
to

obrir
open

un
a

calaix
drawer

enorme.
huge.

‘Pere passed the wrench to Marc. (He) needed it to open a huge drawer.’
b. L’Alba

The Alba
li
DAT

va deixar
lent

el
the

cotxe
car

a
to

la
the

Maria.
Maria.

∅
∅

Havia
had

d’anar
to go

als
to the

Pirineus
Pyrenees

a
to

veure
see

la
the

seva
her

famı́lia.
family.

‘Alba lent her car to Maria. (She) had to go to the Pyrenees to see her family.’

The object-referring completions answer a question like ‘Why did the object referent need the
transferred possession?’ and typically include transferred possessions which are used to achieve
something: a wrench is used to do something; a car is used to go somewhere. In a more fine-

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

grained typology of rhetorical relations, such examples could be coded as conveying purpose, rather
than explanation.12 In contrast, the subject-referring completions usually involved sentences with
transferred possessions such as ‘book’ and ‘toy’. In this case, since it is not very informative to
write about why the object referent needs a book or a toy, the completions rather explained why the
subject transferred the possession to the object.

In fact, according to Kehler et al. (2008), the biases in the relations that express Cause or Effect
(Explanation and Result, respectively) “will depend on the semantics incorporated in the passage
and the referent to which causality or consequentiality is most likely to be attributed in a particular
context” (page 26). Thus, Explanations are not intrinsically subject-biased: in some cases it is more
likely to form a causal link between the two sentences with the subject antecedent, and in other
cases with the object antecedent (see Bott and Solstad (2014) for a typology of explanations which
attempts to make this idea more precise).

The data has also uncovered a strong asymmetry between the production and interpretation of
the overt pronoun. Upon hearing an overt pronoun, a hearer will readily interpret it as referring to
the object, even though the probability of using an overt pronoun to refer to an object is very low.
This data shows that that the division of labor between Nulls and Overts is only partial: present in
interpretation, but not in production. We, thus, see again that production and interpretation are not
mirror images of each other.

The fact that Overts come only in third place in terms of the referring expressions chosen, after
proper names and Nulls, suggests that, although they do display a clear object bias, their role in
discourse is not to indicate such a bias, but rather to signal other relevant properties. Contrast seems
the obvious candidate. As mentioned in Section 2, Overts often convey a contrastive flavor and are
compulsory when they encode Focus or Contrastive Topics.

In order to examine the function of Overts more closely, we can examine their occurrence in
the Free conditions; that is, those completions in which participants freely choose to use a pronoun.
There were 38 such occurrences, of which 87% had object reference and 13% subject reference. In
those cases, we do indeed find some examples in which Overts are conveying a Contrastive Topic,
see (16), or a Focus, see (17), in which the Overt is in the postverbal Contrastive Focus position.

(16) L’Elena
The Elena

li
DAT

va regalar
gave

un
a

llibre
book

a
to

la
the

Mercè.
Mercè.

Ella
She

en
in

canvi
change

li
DAT

va regalar
gave

una
a

rosa.
rose.

“Elena gave a book to Mercè. She gave him a rose instead.”

(17) El
The

Sergi
Sergi

li
DAT

va facilitar
supplied

totes
all

les
the

eines
tools

a
to

l’Àlex.
the Àlex.

Aixı́
Thus

no
not

havia
had

de
to

buscar-les
search them

ell.
he.

“Sergi supplied all the tools to Àlex. Thus, he was not the one that had to look for them”.

These cases, albeit possible, are not by any means representative of most of the data: that is, it is not
the case that pronouns were mostly used to convey Contrastive Topic or Focus. There is, however,
a wider notion of contrast that may be useful to understand the data. Table 3 shows the distribution
of rhetorical conditions among the occurrences of Overts in the Free condition.

If we compare this distribution to the one of the whole Free condition (see table 1), we can see
that the most striking difference is the higher percentage of Violated Expectations. In a Violated
Expectation there is some kind of contrast between what is expected to happen and what really

12. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

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Explanation 29
Occasion 29
Violated Expectation 21
Result 13
Parallelism 8

Table 3: Distribution of rhetorical conditions for Overts in the Free condition

happened, as illustrated in (18) with some of the completions of the experiment. So, although these
cases are not cases of Foci or Contrastive Topics, they do convey contrast at a discourse level. The
use of Overts is, thus, favored by discourse contrastivity, at least in this context, although this is not
a necessary condition for their appearance. The production of Overts will be further discussed in
connection to Experiment 2, which is presented in the next section.

(18) a. La
The

Gemma
Gemma

li
DAT

va subministrar
supplied

tot
all

el
the

material
material

necessary
necessary

a
to

l’Elisena.
the Elisenda.

Tot
All

i
and

això,
this,

ella
she

no
not

li
DAT

va
thanked.

agrair.

“Gemma supplied all the necessary material to Elisenda. However, she did not thank
her.

b. La
The

Sra.
Ms.

Molins
Molins

li
DAT

va cedir
bestowed

la
the

seva
her

col·lecció
collection

de
of

segells
stamps

a
to

la
the

Lluı̈sa.
Lluı̈sa.

Però
But

ella
she

no
not

sabia
know

què
what

fer-ne.
do PART.

“Ms. Molins bestowed her stamp collection on Lluı̈sa. But she did not know what to
do with it.

4. Experiment 2: implicit causality verbs

Experiment 2 is also a discourse-completion study, which uses implicit causality verbs (ICVs). As
mentioned, ICVs are useful to study the role of semantico-pragmatic factors, since they attribute the
cause of the event they denote either to the subject (ICV1s) or to the object (ICV2s), which has been
shown to affect how the pronouns that follow these verbs are interpreted.

4.1 Methods

Materials
Experiment 2 is similar to experiment 1, but it contains two factors: (i) verb type (ICV1 and ICV2)
and (ii) prompt type (Null, Overt, Free Prompt (Free Condition)). There were, thus, 6 conditions:
(19) illustrates the three conditions with an ICV1 and (20) the three conditions with an ICV2.

(19) a. Condition 1: ICV1 + Null
La Núria va sorprendre la Maria. ∅ ...
‘Núria surprised Maria. ∅ ...’

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

b. Condition 2: ICV1 + Overt
La Núria va sorprendre la Maria. Ella ...
‘Núria surprised Maria. She ...’

c. Condition 3: ICV1 + Free
La Núria va sorprendre la Maria. ...
‘Núria surprised Maria. ...’

(20) a. Condition 4: ICV2 + Null
La Núria va felicitar la Maria. ∅ ...
‘Núria congratulated Maria. ∅ ...’

b. Condition 5: ICV2 + Overt
La Núria va felicitar la Maria. Ella ...
‘Núria congratulated Maria. She ...’

c. Condition 6: ICV2 + Free
La Núria va felicitar la Maria. ...
‘Núria congratulated Maria. ...’

The experiment contained 30 items: 15 with an ICV1 and 15 with an ICV2. In each of the items, two
referents of the same gender were mentioned, half containing masculine names and the other half
feminine names. The first referent always appeared as subject and the second one as either direct
object, indirect object or predicative complement. From now on, I will be referring the non-subject
argument as ‘object’. Three lists were constructed, so that each participant only saw each item with
one of the prompts. The lists also contained 20 fillers with non-ICV verbs and with a connector or
a temporal expression as a prompt. The full list of critical items with their English translations can
be seen in Appendix 1.

Based on the previous literature, we formulate the following hypotheses:

1. Nulls are expected to receive more subject interpretations than Overts.

2. Given their lexical semantics, ICVs are expect to trigger a high number of Explanation com-
pletions.

3. Pronoun interpretation is expected to be affected by pragmatic factors. For Explanations, we
expect a contrast between ICV1s and ICV2s: ICV1s are predicted to be subject-biased and
ICV2s to be object-biased. We do not expect other rhetorical relations to be sensitive to the
contrast between ICV1 and ICV2. As we found in Experiment 1, Elaboration is expected to
be subject-biased, and Occasion and Result are expected to be object-biased, regardless of
verb type.

4. Pronoun production is not expected to be affected by rhetorical relations. In the Free condi-
tion, the rate of pronominalization for a particular referent is expected to be similar in ICV1s
and ICV2s.

Procedure
The same procedure described in the previous experiment was followed.

Participants
Seventy-eight participants took part in the experiment. None of the participants had participated

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in Experiment 1. They were all native speakers of Catalan and students at the Universitat Pompeu
Fabra and were entered in a raffle to win a gift certificate.

4.2 Results

A total of 2340 completions (30 items * 78 participants) were collected. The data was coded follow-
ing the same procedure explained for Experiment 1. The antecedent of the referent first mentioned
in the completion was coded into one of the following categories: Subject, Object, Joint (plural ref-
erence to both the subject and the object), Other or Unsure (if the pronoun could be understood as
referring to more than one referent). The results are based on a subset of the completions, in which
both judges agreed that the subject unambiguously refereed to the previous subject or the previ-
ous object. The same exclusions reported for the previous experiment were carried out: all those
completions in which the judges did not agree or the subject was coded as Unsure, Joint or Other.
Also discarded were the cases in which a null pronoun was not used in the conditions ICV1+Null
and ICV2+Null, which amounted to 0.68% (n=16) of the data. In total, 1934 completions were ana-
lyzed. These completions were coded according to the rhetorical relation between the two sentences
and type of referring expression (Null, Overt, Proper Name, etc.) used in the two Free conditions.
As in Experiment 1, any disagreement between the judges was individually discussed and the judges
agreed on a decision. The statistical analysis followed the same methods previously described for
Experiment 1.

Let us start by discussing hypothesis 1, which predicts that Nulls should be more subject-biased
than Overts. Figure 7 shows that this is indeed the case both for ICV1s and ICV2s. We compared
two models in which pronoun reference (subject vs. object) was the dependent variable and which
differed only in the presence or absence of a fixed main effect of pronoun type (Null vs. Overt). A
likelihood-ratio test showed that the effect of pronoun type is significant (χ2 = 175.84, p< .001). If
we take the data in the Free conditions, a similar pattern emerges, as can be seen in figure 8. Again,
in a likelihood-radio test comparing two models which differ only in the presence or absence of a
fixed main effect of pronoun type, the effect of pronoun type is significant (χ2 = 21.78, p< .001).

Figure 7: Proportion of continuations about the subject by verb type (ICV1 vs. ICV2) and prompt
type (Null vs. Overt)

The two figures above have also uncovered another interesting pattern: there are more subject
references with ICV1s than with ICV2s, both with Overt and Nulls. As a result, Nulls show a
clear bias towards the subject with ICV1s, and Overts a strong bias towards the object with ICV2s.
In the other two combinations (Null + VC2, and Overt + VC1), the two biases conflict with each

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

Figure 8: Proportion of continuations about the subject in the Free condition by verb type and form
type

other and, as a result, there is no clear tendency. A model with verb type and pronoun type as
fixed effects was compared to a model with an interaction between pronoun type and verb type
(to achieve convergence, both models only contained items and participants as random effects; see
more details about the non-reduced model in Appendix 2, table 13). A likelihood-ratio test showed
that the interaction between pronoun type and verb type is significant (χ2 = 7.98, p< .005).

We can understand these results as a by-product of both hypotheses 2 and 3: we are expecting
ICV contexts to trigger many Explanations, and Explanation is the rhetorical relation which imposes
different biases (ICV1s towards the subject and ICV2s towards the object). Thus the prevalence of
Explanations is what is responsible for the pattern observed in the tables above. Recall that the
prediction is that the difference in biases in ICV1 and ICV2 contexts should only be present in
Explanation and, therefore, should disappear with other relations.

Let us start by seeing whether ICVs really triggered a high number of Explanation continuations
(Hypothesis 2). Table 4 shows the distribution of rhetorical relations: Explanation does indeed
dominate, followed by Elaboration and Result. Hypothesis 2 is indeed borne out.

Explanation 61
Elaboration 19
Result 14
Violated Expectation 3
Occasion 2
Parallelism 1

Table 4: Distribution of rhetorical relations

We can now examine whether pronoun interpretation is affected by pragmatic factors. Figures 9
and 10 show the subject bias of Nulls and Overts respectively by verb type and rhetorical relation.13

Two models were compared in which pronoun reference was the dependent variable. One of the
models had rhetorical relation, verb type and pronoun type as fixed effects, while the other had an
interaction between the three fixed effects (Elaboration being the baseline; to achieve convergence,
both models only contained items, participants and pronoun type as random effects; see more details
about the model with the interaction in Appendix 2, table 14). A likelihood-ratio test showed that the

13. We eliminate from the analysis the rhetorical relations which account for less than 5% of the data.

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Figure 9: Proportion of continuations about the subject with Nulls (by rhetorical relation and verb
type)

Figure 10: Proportion of continuations about the subject with Overts (by rhetorical relation and verb
type)

interaction is significant (χ2 = 175.54, p< .001). Having seen that there is a significant interaction,
let us examine the data in specific rhetorical relations. For each rhetorical relation, two models were
compared in which pronoun reference was the dependent variable and which differed only in the
presence or absence of a fixed main effect of verb type. This comparison was done both for the data
in the Null and in the Overt condition. As expected, in both cases, likelihood-ratio test showed the
effect of verb type was significant for Explanations: ICV1s are subject biased and ICV2s are not (in
the Null condition, χ2 = 30.80, p< .001; in the Overt condition, χ2 = 42.21, p< .001). Elaboration
is subject-biased in both types of contexts, both with Nulls and Overts: the effect of verb type is not
significant for Overts (χ2 = 2.24, p = .52), but it is significant for Nulls (χ2 = 25.63, p< .001). Result
yields an unexpected significant contrast between ICV1 and ICV2 for the Null pronoun condition,
(χ2 = 14.46, p< .001) while no contrast arises with the Overt pronoun (χ2 = 1.88, p= 0.59). I will
discuss this unexpected contrast in Section 4.4. With the exception of the behavior of Result with
Nulls, hypothesis 3 is also borne out: pronoun interpretation is affected by pragmatic factors.

Finally, let us turn to production data by examining what referring expression participants used
to refer to subject and object depending on whether the context sentence contained an ICV1 or an

22



ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

ICV2.14 Figures 11 and 12 summarize the data. The main observation is that, in both graphs, the
distribution of referring expressions is fairly similar. In figure 11 we can observe, that to refer to
the subject, participants overwhelmingly used a null pronoun regardless of whether the context was
ICV1 or ICV2. In figure 12 we can see that, to refer to the object, the preferred form was also the
null pronoun, but the percentage of proper names increased as well. Whether the verb was ICV1 or
ICV2 does not seem to make a difference. Again we find that in both cases Overts were scarcely
produced.

Figure 11: Distribution of referring expressions to refer to the subject

Figure 12: Distribution of referring expressions to refer to the object

We compared two models in which referring expression (Null vs. not-Null) was the dependent
variable. One of the models had verb type and reference as fixed effects, while the other had
an interaction between the two fixed effects (to achieve convergence, both models only contained
items, participants and reference as random effects; see more details about the non-reduced model in
Appendix 2, table 15). A likelihood-ratio test showed the effect of the interaction is not significant
(χ2 = 0.25, p = .61). In fact, as it can be seen in 15, only reference is significant, while neither verb
type nor the interaction between verb type and reference are significant. Thus, hypothesis 4 is borne
out: production is not affected by rhetorical relation, which greatly affects interpretation.

14. As in experiment 1, cases in which a noun phrase or a demonstrative was used are excluded from the analysis.

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4.3 Applying the Bayesian model

Let us examine again how well the Bayesian model can predict the observed interpretation biases
of the Null pronoun to refer to a subject antecedent.

The interpretation biases observed in the data and the ones predicted by the Bayesian models
(computed as explained in 3.3 for experiment 1) are summarized in (21). It can be seen how the
Bayesian model adequately captures the tendencies in the data. A linear model analysis was per-
formed over item means, and the correlation between the expected and the observed probabilities is
significant (adjustedR2= 0.57, p< .001). The Bayesian account outperforms the the Mirror Model,
which equates P (subject | null) with the probability that a null is used given that the referent is
the subject (P (subject | null), or the Expectancy model, which equates P (subject | null) with
the probability that the subject is named again (P (subject)). In the case of the Mirror Model the
correlation is not significant (adjusted R2= -0.02, p= .65); in the case of the Expectancy Model the
correlation is significant (adjusted R2= 0.44, p < .001), but lower than the one obtained with the
Bayesian model.

(21) a. Observed P (subject | null) = 0.63
b. P (null | subject) = 0.89
c. P (subject)= 0.50
d. P (null) = P (null | subject) ∗ P (subject) + P (null | object) ∗ P (object) = 0.70
e. Predicted P (subject | null)= 0.64

4.4 Discussion

Experiment 2 clearly showed how the interpretation of Nulls and Overts is influenced both by gram-
matical and pragmatic factors. Null subject bias increases in Explanations with an ICV1 verb, while
it decreases with an ICV2 verb. The opposite it true for Overts: they have a strong object bias in
Explanations with an ICV2 verb, which decreases in an ICV1 context. In contrast, pronoun produc-
tion is not affected by pragmatic factors. The rate of use of Nulls in Explanations remains constant
regardless of whether the verb was ICV1 or ICV2.

A surprising result of Experiment 2 was the bias shown by Nulls in Result relations. We ex-
pected Results to not be sensitive to verb type and, considering what was found with Transfer of
Possession Verbs, to display an object bias. Instead, we found an object bias with ICV1s, and a
subject bias with ICV2s. This behavior is actually not so surprising if we take into account that
many verbs also display biases attributing the consequences of the event to one of their arguments.
This bias is usually called ‘implicit consequentiality’15 (Stewart et al., 1998; Crinean and Garnham,
2006; Pickering and Majid, 2007). Many of the ICVs used the experiments are actually psychologi-
cal verbs (47%). In those cases, the subject position of an ICV1-sentence is occupied by the stimulus
and the object by the experiencer, as in ‘intimidate’ or ’terrify’ (see the first sentences in (22)). This
pattern is reversed in ICV2s, such as ‘hate’ or ‘fear’ (see the first sentences in (23)). When a Result
relation was expressed, it most often conveyed the consequences for the experiencer: this amounts
to object references for ICV1s and subject references for ICV2s. The second sentences in (22) and
(23) show typical completions of both cases. Thus, our hypothesis that, in Results, we would find an
object bias (like we did for TPVs) was not borne out: instead, what we find is that Results display an
experiencer bias (see Crinean and Garnham (2006) for more discussion on the relationship between

15. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this concept to me.

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

implicit causality, implicit consequentiality and thematic roles). Table 5 shows the subject bias in
Results by the thematic role of the subject: if the subject was an experiencer, the pronoun had a
categorical subject preference, while if it was a stimulus, it had a strong object preference. In the
cases of non-psychological verbs, we find the expected object preference.

(22) ICV1
a. El

The
Pol
Pol

intimida
intimidates

l’Àlex.
the Àlex.

∅
∅

Sempre
always

que
that

el
him

veu
sees
∅
∅

marxa
leaves

ràpid.
quickly.

“Pol intimidates Àlex. Whenever (he) sees him, he leaves quickly.”
b. La

The
Pilar
Pilar

té
has

la
the

Blanca
Blanca

atemorida.
terrified.

∅
∅

Sempre
Always

arriba
arrives

plorant
crying

a
at

casa.
home.

“Pilar terrifies Blanca. (She) always comes home crying.”

(23) ICV2
a. En

The
Guillem
Guillem

té
has

por
fear

del
o the

Nicolau.
Nicolau.

Per
For

això,
this,

∅
∅

no
not

va
goes

a
to

l’escola.
the school.

“Guillem is afraid of Nicolau. This is why, (he) does not go to school.”
b. La

The
Candela
Candela

té
has

enveja
envy

de
of

la
the

Júlia.
Júlia.

Per
For

això,
this.

∅
∅

vol
wants

deixar-la
leave her

en
in

ridı́cul.
embarrassment.

“Candela is envious of Júlia. This is why, (she) wants to ridicule her.
c. El

The
Julià
Julià

odia
hates

el
the

Nil.
Nil.
∅
∅

M’ha
DAT has

conessat
confessed

que
that

un
one

dia
day
∅
∅

el
him

matarà.
kill.

“Julià hates Nil. (He) has confessed to me that one day (he) will kill him.”

Agent 35
Experiencer 100
Stimulus 6

Table 5: % of subject references in Results by thematic role of the subject

Experiment 2 also confirmed the low probability of using an Overt to refer to either antecedent.
Again, although presumably speakers could use an Overt to signal they do not want to refer to the
most prominent referent, they usually do not do that and use a proper name instead. In order to
understand why an Overt is used, we can examine those completions in which an Overt was chosen
in the Free conditions. There were 49 such cases: they mostly refer to the object (80%), consistent
with what occurred in the Overt conditions, and mostly occur with ICV2s (63%), which is what we
would expect considering their object bias.

The rhetorical relations found in those cases are shown in table 6. The main finding is that
there is an increase in the percentage of Results and a decrease in the percentage of Elaborations.
Although we do find a few examples of Violated Expectation (see the examples in (24)), they do
not account for a significant amount of the data, unlike what we found in Experiment 1. The reason
is probably that the items in Experiment 1 favored completions in which participants narrated the
expected (Occasions) or unexpected (Violated Expectations) events that followed the transfer of
possession. In contrast, the items in Experiment 2 favor mainly Explanations about the event of
the first sentence, or Results for the experiencer/theme. In all the examples in which the Overt was

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used to express a Result, it referred to the object, which was either the experiencer or the theme (see
examples in (25)).

Explanation 58
Elaboration 10
Result 24
Violated Expectation 6
Parallelism 2

Table 6: Distribution of rhetorical relations Free + Overt

(24) a. L’Andreu
The Andreu

va demanar
gave

disculpes
apologies

al
to the

Joan.
Joan.

Tot
Everything

i
and

això,
this,

ell
he

no
not

va acceptar-les.
accepted them

“Andreu apologized to Joan. However, he did not accept them.”
b. L’Iris

The Iris
confia
trusts

en
in

la
the

Sı́lvia.
Sı́lvia.

I
And

ella
she

la
her

va trair.
betrayed.

“Iris trusts in Sı́lvia. And she betrayed her.”

(25) a. L’Esteve
The Esteve

va espantar
scared

el
the

Roger.
Roger.

Ell
He

el
him

va empenyer
pushed

com
as

a
a

venjança.
revenge.

“Esteve scared Roger. He pushed him in revenge.”
b. L’Adam

The Adam
va elogiar
praised

en
the

Mateu.
Mateu.

Ell
He

es
REFL

va posar
turned

vermell.
red.

“Adam praised Mateu. He blushed.”

5. Conclusion

This paper has uncovered two main asymmetries concerning pronouns in Catalan: (i) the interpre-
tation of Nulls is affected by several pragmatic factors, which do not influence production, and (ii)
while Overt pronouns show a strong interpretation bias towards the object, they are not frequently
produced with this goal. Thus, the data supports only partially the idea that there is a division of
labor between Null and Overt pronouns: while Nulls are clearly the default pronouns in Catalan,
the role of the Overts is severely restricted.

Overall the data supports the model put forward by Rohde and Kehler (2014), according to
which interpretation and production are not affected by the same set of factors. In their words,
although it might be natural to expect “that speakers will employ pronouns in just those contextual
circumstances in which the intended referent will be favored by the comprehender’s own biases”
(Rohde and Kehler, 2014, p. 924), this is not what our data shows. The results are compatible
with a model in which production is affected by structural factors (i.e. Nulls are subject biased and
Overts are non-subject biased) and insensitive to semantico-pragmatic factors.

According to Fukumura and Van Gompel (2010), this difference between structural and semantico-
pragmatic factors arises because only the former contributes to an entity’s accessibility. This makes

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

sense if we consider that while speakers can manipulate the structure of a sentence (for instance,
choosing the passive form instead of the active form) depending on the relative accessibility of the
entities in their discourse model, no such choice occurs with semantico-pragmatic factors. The
speaker will use an ICV1 or an ICV2 depending on the meaning she wants to communicate; she
will not choose one verb or another depending on the accessibility of the entities. The same reason-
ing can be applied to rhetorical relations: a speaker will link two utterances in her discourse by an
Occasion or by an Elaboration depending on what is relevant for the discourse. It is unlikely that
she will choose to elaborate on a previous utterance just to create a bias towards a certain entity.
Now, by uttering an Elaboration a bias is certainly created and the interpreter can use this cue, but
the reason to utter an Elaboration (as opposed to, say, an Occasion) is not to create the bias.

More generally, the picture that seems to emerge is one in which the interpreter combines mul-
tiple cues to assign reference (in particular, the grammatical bias associated with the choice of
referential form with the prior probability of who will be mentioned), while the speaker ignores
some of the cues that could potentially shape production. The result that production ignores factors
which do affect interpretation challenges the audience design hypothesis (Clark, 1996), the idea
that speakers always plan their utterance with the hearer in mind. It is instead compatible with a
view that speakers for the most part use their own model to plan their utterances, while ignoring the
hearer’s (see Fukumura and van Gompel (2012) for experimental evidence showing that speakers
use their own discourse model, and not the hearer’s, when producing referential expressions).

A possible, although at this stage speculative, explanation of why speakers should ignore some
cues which are useful for hearers would be that production is a more costly process than inter-
pretation. A speaker has the burden to plan and produce the utterance, which includes selecting the
appropriate lexical items within a huge lexicon, giving them a grammatical structure and articulating
the relevant sounds. Thus, language production is undoubtedly hard (see, for instance, MacDonald
(2013) for a model in which linguistic form is derived from the attempts by the speakers to mitigate
utterance planning difficulties). In contrast, the task of the hearer is relatively simpler and that could
be why the burden of integrating pragmatic information is passed exclusively to him. This would
also be compatible with the finding that interpreters accommodate the needs of the speaker (from
perspective-taking (Duran et al., 2011), to phonetic adaptations (Kraljic et al., 2008) or lexical and
syntactic ambiguity resolution (MacDonald et al., 1994)).

Apart from providing support to the Bayesian approach with data from a language other than
English16, this study also contributes to the characterization of Overts in Romance null-subject lan-
guages. Although we replicated the non-subject interpretation bias often discussed in the literature,
a very striking result of our experiments is that Overts are rarely produced to fulfill this goal. We
explored the possibility that Overts, like stressed pronouns in English, are only used in strictly con-
trastive uses, but this idea was not supported by the data. In fact, although, as mentioned, Overts
were not used often, in some of the cases in which they were chosen, their function seemed to
be precisely to refer to low-salience referents (which is fully compatible with their interpretation
bias). But this raises the question: if Overts can be used to refer to low-salience referents, why
don’t speakers do it more often? I do not have a full answer to this question, but the difference in
distribution of rhetorical relations seems to suggest they play an important role in licensing Overts.
For future work, corpus-based research is planned so that the behavior of Overt pronouns can be
further studied and the predictions of the Bayesian hypothesis can be tested with naturally-occurring

16. Similar studies were conducted in Japanese (Ueno and Kehler, 2016), but the predictions of the Bayesian approach
were not tested.

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data. A second venue for future work includes the use of richer contexts in the experiments. While
our results support those who argue that predictability does not affect form production (Fukumura
and Van Gompel, 2010; Rohde and Kehler, 2014), recent research has made the opposite point. In
particular, in Rosa and Arnold (2017), the effects of predictability on form production were seen
more clearly in tasks with very rich contexts, in which participants were asked to describe a series
of pictures which told a coherent story. Thus, further work is needed to clarify the relationship
between predictability and form production. Finally, we are also planning to further examine TPVs,
comparing those in which the source argument is in subject position with those in which it is not,
to corroborate that semantico-pragmatic factors do not play a role in determining referential form.
We expect that we should not find a difference in pronominalization rate depending on whether the
subject is the source or the goal, in the same way the we found similar pronominalization rates for
rhetorical relations with opposed biases.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and to the Associate Editor for their constructive and
detailed comments, suggestions and criticisms, which greatly contributed to improve this paper, as
well as to the audiences of the venues where previous versions of this research was presented: Glif,
Amore, Universitat de les Illes Balears, University of Vienna and XPrag 2017. I would also like to
thank Aina Obis for her work in annotating the data, Andrew Kehler for many suggestions during the
early stages of this project and Hannah Rohde for help in generating the graphs. The research under-
lying this article has been partially supported by projects FFI2015-66732-P and FFI2015-67991-P,
funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and the European Regional De-
velopment Fund (FEDER, UE).

Appendix 1

Experiment 1
El Joan li va portar un got d’aigua al Robert. (‘Joan brought a glass of water to Robert.’)
El Pere li va passar la clau anglesa al Marc. (‘Pere passed a wrench to Marc.’)
En Roger li va lliurar el treball al professor Ramos. (‘Roger submitted his work to professor
Ramos.’)
En Pep li va enviar el seu CV al Toni. (‘Pep sent his CV to Toni.’)
La Marta li va donar una samarreta a la Ruth. (‘Marta gave a t-shirt to Ruth.’)
L’Elena li va regalar un llibre a la Mercè. (‘Elena gifted a book to Mercè.’)
La Jèssica li va servir l’arròs a la Carme. (‘Jèssica served the rice to Carme.’)
L’Eva li va tornar la grapadora a l’Esther. (‘Eva returned the stapler to Esther.’)
El Martı́ li va proporcionar medicines al Miquel. (‘Martı́ provided medicines to Miquel.’)
La Rosa li va vendre una postal a la Dolors. (‘Rosa sold a postcard to Dolors.’)
El Jordi li va dur el sopar a l’Ernest. (‘Jordi brought dinner to Ernest.’)
La Sra. Molins li ha cedit la seva col·lecció de segells a la Lluı̈sa. (‘Mrs. Molins brought her stamp
collection to Lluı̈sa.’)
L’Adrià li va entregar un sobre a l’Albert. (‘Adrià delivered an envelope to Albert.’)
L’Alba li ha deixat el cotxe a la Marina. (‘Alba lent her car to Marina.’)
La Teresa li va acostar la sal a la Núria. (‘Teresa moved the salt closer to Núria.’)

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

El Sergi li va facilitar totes les eines a l’Àlex. (‘Sergi provided all the tools to Àlex.’)
La Gemma Martı́nez li va subministrar el material necessari a l’Elisenda. (‘Gemma Martı́nez sup-
plied the necessary material to Elisenda.’)
El Joan li va donar una joguina a l’Enric. (‘Joan gave a toy to Enric.’)

Experiment 2

ICV1:
L’Andreu va demanar disculpes al Joan. (‘Andreu apologized to Joan.’)
La Mar va ofendre l’Irene. (‘Mar offended Irene.’)
La Raquel va enganyar l’Aurora. (‘Raquel deceived Aurora.’)
L’Àngels va humiliar la Marga. (‘Àngels humiliated Marga.’)
L’Abel va fer enfadar el Cesc. (‘Abel annoyed Cesc.’)
La Sara fa riure molt la Laia. (‘Sara amuses Laia.’)
El Miquel treu el Gerard de polleguera. (‘Miquel bothers Gerard.’)
L’Amanda va deixar la Montse bocabadada. (‘Amanda amazed Montse.’)
L’Esteve fa posar nerviós el David. (‘Esteve makes David nervous.’)
El Quim va decebre el Pep. (‘Quim disappointed Pep.’)
L’Esteve va espantar el Roger. (‘Esteve scared Roger.’)
En Lluı́s va sorprendre el Vı́ctor. (‘Lluı́s surprised Vı́ctor.’)
El Jordi té el Pau absolutament captivat. (‘Jordi captivated Pau.’)
En Pol intimida l’Àlex. (‘Pol intimidates Àlex.’)
La Pilar té la Blanca atemorida. (’Pilar frightens Blanca.’)

ICV2:
La Marina va consolar la Susanna. (‘Marina comforted Susanna.’)
La Isabel va felicitar la Júlia. (‘Isabel congratulated Júlia.’)
La Noemı́ va ajudar la Clara. (‘Noemı́ helped Clara.’)
El Dı́dac es va burlar del Xavier. (‘Dı́dac mocked Xavier.’)
L’Alı́cia va calmar la Xènia. (‘Alı́cia calmed Xènia.’)
L’Àdam va elogiar en Mateu. (‘Àdam praised Mateu.’)
La Cati va esbroncar la Conxita. (‘Cati told Conxita off.’)
En Tomàs va renyar el Josep Antoni. (‘Tomàs scolded Josep Antoni.’)
L’Aleix va donar les gràcies al Felip. (‘Aleix thanked Felip.’)
L’Isaac va corregir el Joel. (‘Issac corrected Joel.’)
En Guillem té por del Nicolau. (‘Guillem fears Nicolau.’)
La Candela té enveja de la Joana. (‘Candela is jealous of Joana.’)
El Julià odia el Nil. (‘Julià hates Nil.’)
L’Iris confia en la Sı́lvia. (‘Iris trusts Sı́lvia.’)
La Laura valora la Xènia. (‘Laura values Xènia.’)

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Appendix 2

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
Null 1.04 0.27 3.85 0.0001
Overt -1.20 0.39 -3.05 0.002

Table 7: Experiment 1 Results. Pronoun reference (subjects, object) by prompt (Null, Overt, Free)
Model: reference ∼ prompt + (prompt|subject)+(prompt|item)

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
Subject -22.85 9.79 -2.33 < .01

Table 8: Experiment 1 Results. Form of referring expression (Null, not-Null) by reference (subject,
object)
Model: nullBinary ∼ reference + (reference|subject)+(reference|item)

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
Subject 30.07 6.87 4.37 < .001

Table 9: Experiment 1 Results. Form of referring expression (name, not-name) by reference (sub-
ject, object)
Model: nameBinary ∼ reference + (reference|subject)+(reference|item)

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
Null -0.95 0.24 -3.92 < .0001
Overt 1.30 0.25 5.18 < .0001

Table 10: Experiment 1 Results. Rhetorical relations (subject-biased, not subject-biased) by prompt
(Free, Null, Overt)
Model: rhetoricalBinary ∼ prompt + (prompt|subject) + (prompt|item)

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
Object-biased -4.54 0.38 -11.886 < .0001

Table 11: Experiment 1 Results. Reference (subject, object) by rhetorical relation (subject-biased,
not subject-biased)
Model: reference ∼ rhetoricalBinary + (rhetoricalBinary|subject)+(rhetoricalBinary|item)

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ASYMMETRIES IN CATALAN PRONOUNS

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
Explanation 0.97 2.82 0.34 0.73
Occasion 0.31 4.64 0.06 0.94

Table 12: Experiment 1 Results. Form of referring expression (Null, non-Null) by rhetorical relation
(Elaboration, Explanation, Occasion)
Model: nullBinary ∼ rhetorical + (rhetorical|subject)+(rhetorical|item)

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
Overt -1.20 0.18 -6.6 < .0001
ICV2 -1.20 0.26 -4.46 < .0001
Overt*ICV2 -0.75 0.26 -2.82 0.004

Table 13: Experiment 2 Results. Reference (subject, object) by pronoun (Null, Overt) * verb type
(ICV1, ICV2)
Model: reference ∼ pronoun*type + (1|subject)+(1|item)

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
ICV2 1.49 0.63 2.33 0.01
Explanation 1.19 0.42 2.81 0.004
Result -3.02 0.73 -4.08 < .0001
Overt -1.10 0.45 -2.44 0.01
ICV2*Explanation -4.55 0.66 -6.83 < .0001
ICV2*Result 1.12 0.99 1.13 0.25
ICV2*Overt -0.84 0.75 -1.12 0.26
Explanation*Overt 0.25 0.55 0.45 0.64
Result*Overt 0.03 0.93 0.03 0.97
ICV2*Explanation*Overt 0.11 0.92 0.12 0.90
ICV2*Result*Overt -2.30 1.36 -1.68 0.09

Table 14: Experiment 2 Results. Reference (subject, object) by pronoun (Null, Overt) * verb type
(ICV1, ICV2) * rhetorical relation (Elaboration, Explanation, Result)
Model: reference ∼ pronoun*type*rhetorical + (pronoun|subject)+(pronoun|item)

Variable Estimate Error z-value p-value
ICV2 -0.66 0.65 -1.02 0.30
Subject -3.09 0.78 -3.92 < .0001
ICV2*Subject 0.52 1.04 0.50 0.61

Table 15: Experiment 2 Results. Form of referring expression (Null, non-Null) by reference (sub-
ject, object) * verb type (ICV1, ICV2)
Model: formBinary ∼ reference*type + (reference| subject) + (reference| item)

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