The Effect of Thematic Roles on Pronoun Use and Frequency of Reference Continuation

Goal and source thematic roles have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, an effect that has been linked to the reader’s tendency to focus on the consequences of the event (Stevenson, Crawley, Kleinman, 1994). Using a story continuation ex-periment, I show that speakers also tend to use pronouns more often for goal entities than source entities. Furthermore, the experiment and a corpus analysis reveal that speakers tend to refer more frequently to goal entities than source entities overall. I use the parallel findings about pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation to argue that referent accessibility is influenced by the comprehender’s estimate of the likelihood that a referent will be continued in the discourse. Pronoun comprehension has been argued to be influenced by the accessibility of potential referents in the discourse representation, which is driven by a number of factors (see Arnold, 1998, for a review). One such factor that has received atten-tion is the thematic roles of discourse referents (e.g., Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill,