Description:

Two much of a good thing? Two-pronoun sequences and prominence in English and Finnish.

Transitive clauses with two personal pronouns in coargument position (e.g. “she saw her”, “he helped him”) are perfectly natural in English. But perhaps surprisingly, such two-pronoun sequences are highly dispreferred in Finnish. To further our understanding of the notion of ‘prominence,’ I report psycholinguistic studies and corpus analyses on two-pronoun sequences in English and Finnish.  I present evidence showing that the Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint cannot be reduced to a pure disambiguation phenomenon, nor to linear proximity, phonological similarity, or the presence of another option in the language’s anaphoric paradigm. I explore this phenomenon in relation to other dissimilation phenomena and obviation patterns in Algonquian languages.