The logophoricity constraint on German demonstrative pronouns
Umesh Patil, Sara Meuser, Stefan Hinterwimmer

German demonstrative pronouns, DPros (die, der, das), and personal pronouns, PPros (sie, er, es), exhibit contrastive behavior in terms of their antecedent preference -- PPros prefer discourse topics as antecedents while DPros avoid them. Hinterwimmer and Bosch (2017) argues that DPro are anti-logophoric and avoid discourse topics because topics are default perspective-holders, however, in the presence of a prominent narrator, the narrator should become the perspective-holder and hence the discourse topic should become available as an antecedent. We carried out two eyetracking studies (n=78) in the visual-world paradigm that tested this hypothesis. Participants heard 3-sentence stories that first introduced two referents and later a DPro which could refer to either of the two. The gaze patterns at the onset of the DPro revealed that in the control condition the topical referent was clearly dispreferred by the DPro, but in the prominent-narrator condition it became more available for the DPro.