Indirect pronominal anaphora in English and French Marginal rarity, or unmarked norm? Some psycholinguistic evidence

While for certain linguists (e.g. Erku & Gundel, 1987) and psycholinguists (e.g. Sanford et al., 1983), using unaccented third person pronouns to refer to implicit referents is impossible or highly marked, for other linguists (e.g. Yule, 1982) and psycholinguists (e.g. Greene et al., 1994), this is not only acceptable but common in normal conversational discourse. If we draw a principled distinction between two main types of implicit referent (central or nuclear referents, and peripheral ones), then both sides in the debate may be correct. The results of two reading experiments in both English and French conducted to test this distinction showed indeed that object pronominal reference to implicit referents only caused slower reading times compared to explicit referents for peripheral referents.