Consider the sentence Oliver said that Samuel washed him vs himself. How do English speaking adults and children know that him means Oliver; whereas himself means Samuel? Traditionally the answer has been determined by (possibly innate) grammatical ‘binding principle’ constraints. The present work instead tests the claim of functionalist-pragmatic accounts that interpretation is determined primarily by what the speaker most plausibly intends to convey. For example, by using the low-frequency, marked reflexive form himself, the speaker is highlighting that the entity affected by the action is – unusually – also the agent of that action. In a forced-choice sentence-completion paradigm (with accompanying animations), we examined whether adults’ (N = 60) and 6- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 60; M = 6;10) use of a reflexive (himself) versus a non-reflexive pronoun (him) is determined by functional-pragmatic constraints. In a baseline ‘agentive’ condition (e.g., Samuel brushed paint all over…) both adults and children rarely used him over their preferred choice of himself. But in a ‘stative’ condition where the PATIENT is NOT necessarily the AGENT (e.g., Samuel has paint all over…) both adults and children were significantly more likely to choose him. This raises the possibility that discourse-pragmatic constraints can explain phenomena traditionally attributed to syntactic binding principles.
Blything et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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