The Production of Subject Anaphoric Expressions in Italian and Mexican Spanish: A Forced-Choice Experimental Study

We compare the production of anaphoric expressions in Spanish and Italian. In two sentence completion tasks, Spanish and Italian-speaking participants complete sentence fragments where we manipulate the location of the antecedents (in a main or subordinate clause), the gender of the antecedents (similar or different) and the referent of the anaphoric expression (subject or object antecedent). Our results show a weaker subject bias for null pronouns and a weaker object bias for overt pronouns in Spanish compared to Italian. In addition, a thetic interpretation of the initial (subordinate) clause decreases the accessibility of the subject antecedent, leading to an increased use of noun phrases when there is gender-similarity between antecedents. By including gender dissimilar antecedents, we further observe an increase in speakers’ production of overt pronouns when reference to an object antecedent is expected.