Experimenting with imposters: what modulates choice of person agreement in pronouns?

Abstract

Imposters are grammatically third-person expressions used to refer to the firstperson
speaker or second-person addressee (e.g. ‘the present authors’ when used to refer to
the first-person writer, ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy’ when used by parents for self-reference in
child-directed speech). Current analyses of imposters differ in whether they derive the
unusual referential properties of imposters using syntactic means or attribute them to
semantic and pragmatics. We aim to shed light on these competing approaches by means of a
psycholinguistic experiment focusing on first-person imposters that investigates the kinds of
pronouns (first-person vs. third-person) used to refer to imposter antecedents. Our results
show that manipulating the prominence of the first-person speaker does not significantly
boost the acceptability of first-person pronouns in imposter-referring contexts. However, our
results suggest that a purely syntactic approach may not be sufficient either, as
psycholinguistic processing factors also appear to be relevant.
Keywords: person agreement, agreement mismatch, pronoun, imposters, psycholinguistics,
accessibility, prominence.