Accented Pronouns and Unusual Antecedents: A Corpus Study

Accent on a pronoun has often been assumed to signal an “unusual” antecedent, i.e. something other than the most salient compatible antecedent. However, this assumption has not received adequate empirical investigation to date, and in particular, spontaneous conversational dialogues have never been studied to verify the saliencebased proposals. I analyze a richly annotated corpus of naturalistic speech, manually labeled for coreference relations, accents, and contrast, in order to understand what factors govern the presence of accent on a pronoun and thereby gain insight into what pronominal accent may be communicating. The results suggest that not only are differences among speakers and pronouns key components in explaining the variation in pronominal accentuation, but also that pronominal accent may often be signaling contrast rather than something about the attentional status or salience of the pronoun’s referent.