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In:The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations
Edited by Sonja Riesberg, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig
[Studies in Language Companion Series 240] 2026
► pp. 488–517

Chapter 19
High animacy does not favour zero over pronouns – especially for objects

ORCiD logo with link | University of Bamberg
ORCiD logo with link | University of Zurich
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Since Givón (1983) and Ariel (1990), a large body of research continues to assume that zero anaphors reflect a higher degree of accessibility than overt pronominal forms. However, when the features of animacy or person are taken as its metric, existing case studies do not consistently confirm a correlation between high accessibility and zero form, and some report the opposite tendency. In this chapter we bring a broader cross-linguistic perspective to the question, leveraging data from a multilingual richly annotated spoken language corpus covering 16 typologically diverse languages. We identify a surprisingly robust trend in support of a reversal of expected accessibility-accounts: Overall, it is non-human referents rather than human, and third person rather than first and second person, which favour zero expression. Our findings provide cross-linguistic support for the constraint ‘avoid non-human pronouns’, found by Genetti and Crain (2003) for Nepali, and a tendency to overtly realise speech-act participants as pronouns. Furthermore, we identify a significant effect of syntactic role, such that these regularities are more clearly evident for direct objects than for transitive subjects. We explore possible explanations for these results, noting similarities between our findings and well-documented patterns of differential indexing, informativity and surprisal (Haspelmath 2021). More generally, these findings call for a re-assessment of the view that a single principle such as accessibility can account for referential choice among all form types. For the choice between reduced forms (pronouns and zero), distinct principles may be operative.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Accessibility and referential choice
    • 2.2The paradox of reduced forms
    • 2.3Interim summary
  • 3.Research questions and data sources
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Summary and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (112)
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