Discourse structure affects reference resolution to events in English: Evidence from a new paradigm

Reference to events using pronouns like it or demonstratives like that has been difficult to study, because unlike in reference to people or objects, the ground truth of interpretation is harder to establish. In this paper, we introduce a new task to understand the roles of three parameters in event reference resolution: The referential expressions themselves, sentential aspect, and discourse structure. We find that different referring expressions reliably refer to specific parts of a discourse, and confirm previous findings that sentential aspect influences referential accessibility; that the structure of a discourse itself has a major effect on reference resolution, and most notably that, contrary to predictions in the literature, some events that are not on the right-frontier of a discourse are nevertheless available for reference. Our findings contribute to a growing literature on anaphor resolution that finds that the parameter structure that determines reference resolution is multifaceted, but predictable.