When Contrast Overrides Animacy: Overt Personal Pronouns as Subjects in Anaphoric Contexts in Adult Romanian

Abstract

The current study investigates how adult Romanian speakers choose between overt and null pronoun subjects in inter-sentential anaphoric contexts, and how their choices are shaped by two interacting factors: contrast and animacy. Our results from two forced choice tasks conducted on adult native speakers of Romanian show that contrastive contexts strongly favor the use of overt pronominal subjects, in line with proposals that overt pronouns mark contrast. At the same time, animacy exerts a significant effect, with overt pronouns being more likely to refer to animate than inanimate antecedents. Importantly, however, the requirement to mark contrast can override the animacy bias, such that overt pronouns may naturally be used for inanimate antecedents in contrastive contexts. This finding suggests that animacy operates as a probabilistic preference rather than as a categorical restriction in Romanian, and that pragmatic-discourse requirements take precedence when the two factors conflict.