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<Paper uid="C90-2047">
  <Title>Centering theory and the Italian pronominal system</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
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2 versa
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    <Paragraph position="0"> 1C/ indicates a null subject and can be translated as an unstressed pronoun in English. In all the examples I will be using, if a proper name ends in -o or -i, it has a male referent; if it ends in -a, a female referent. The translations I provide are literal and generally word by word.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  minology may lead the reader to a wrong conclusion. In fact, while the &amp;quot;unstressed&amp;quot; pronouns can never be stressed, the &amp;quot;stressed&amp;quot; pronouns can, but not necessarily ~re.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 270 1 To formalize the concept of expected referent, :he resorts to the notion of Thema, defined as the subject of a primary predication, where x is a primary predicate of y iff x and y form a constituent which is either O-marked or \[+ INFL\]. tie then says that a pronoun in position of 'rhema is expected to have another Thema as antecedent, and that if this coindexing occurs, the pronoun must be a weak one.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Through these definitions and rules he manages to account for a wide range of data, as far as single sentences are concerned, but when he tries to extend them to discourse, their usefulhess and predictive power is not sufficient, and ,~ometimes they give the wrong prediction. This is partly due to his very simplistic view of discourse, which he considers as a conjunction of sentences. Even for those sentences in which this view is sufficient, the argument that coreference depends only on the syntactic structure of the discourse and that we cannot use a weak pronoun when the theory predicts that a strong one is expected does not hold. Consider the following example:  Non gli,i/j ha nemmeno detto &amp;quot;ciao&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Hei not to-himj has even said &amp;quot;hi&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Ieri Carloi ha incontrato Mariaj.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Yesterday Carloi has met Mariaj.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> C/,ilj Non gl|i/,j ha nemmeno detto &amp;quot;ciao&amp;quot;. Shej not to-himi has even said &amp;quot;hi&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Calabrese's analysis correctly explains the allowed and disallowed coreferences in DI: Mario is not the Thema of Dl.a. So, if we want to have the subject of Dl.b refer to Mario, we can.aot use a weak pronoun, but we have to use a ~trong one: in fact, if we do use a null subject, it is interpreted as referring to Carlo.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Let's now consider D2. The structure of the I;wo discourses is exactly the same. Therefore I;he theory predicts that, if we want to refer to Maria, which is not the Thema of D2.a, we have t;o use a strong pronoun, and not a null one: in~:vtead, D2,b is almost perfect.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> The reason is that in D2.b the null subject has two potential referents, one male and the other :lbmale. While processing the sentence, the pos,ibility that the null subject refers to Carlo is culed out when the clitic gli, marked for masculine, is found. In fact, gli has to refer to Carlo; given that gli is not reflexive, it cannot corefer with the subject, therefore the latter is forced to refer to Maria.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> This kind of disambiguation cannot be performed in Dl.b, in which the null subject has two potential referents of the same gender.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> I should mention that Calabrese, at the beginning of his paper, says that such features \[gender, number and person\] allow a first selection among the possible refe~ents which are assigned to the pronominal. Presumably he would use these features as a superimposed filter to be applied to the whole sentence after it ha~s been completely read or heard.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> Itowever, this could hardly fit in a model of how people process discourse: it is very likely that the normal human mode of operation is incremental \[Ste89\]. My claim is that disambiguation clues have to be taken into account as soon as they are available while processing a sentence. We will see in fact that they can help to make a discourse coherent or not according to their position in the sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> Notice that the issue here is to account not so much for the grammatieality or ungrammaticality of a sentence, as pure syntactic accounts do, but for more or less coherence in a discourse: this is exactly the purpose of centering theory.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> in particular, centering relates discourse coherence with the inference load that a certain sequence of utterances, and especially a certain choice of referring expressions, requires on the part of the hearer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="16"> In the next section, I'll show how centering theory can be useful to explain certain uses of Italian pronouns in discourse, and in turn, how a richer pronominal system caz~ help to refine the rules that centering uses.</Paragraph>
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