Effects of evaluation and prominence on the resolution of German demonstratives

This paper deals with German demonstratives from the 'der', 'die', 'das' (DPros) and 'dieser', 'diese', 'dieses' (DemPros) paradigms. We investigated the hypothesis that DPros can refer to a discourse referent that is information structurally prominent when the speaker is available as perspectivetaker while DemPros are not sensitive to perspective taking. The second hypothesis is that DemPros show a stronger preference towards the last-mentioned referent than DPros. We conducted an experiment combining offline- and online-measurements. Our results suggest that perspective plays a role in pronoun resolution and that prominence gives rise to more nuanced preferences among several antecedents.