Easy as ABC. Functional-pragmatic factors explain “binding-principle” constraints on pronoun interpretation: Evidence from nine pre-registered rating studies.

How do English-speakers interpret pronouns (e.g., himself, him and he) in sentences such as Samuel told Oliver about himself, Samuel told Oliver about the picture of him, and He was driving home, when Yusuf started coughing? Since the 1980s, patterns of (im)possible pronoun interpretation have been taken as some of the strongest evidence for highly abstract (and possibly innate) grammatical principles. The present set of nine preregistered studies tested an alternative possibility: that listeners’ interpretations are based instead on their functional-pragmatic understanding of what the speaker most likely intended to convey, given both the speaker’s choice of words and the listener’s knowledge about the world. Across all studies, participants’ judgments varied according to the relative real-world event-likelihood of the possible interpretations, to the speaker’s choice of the particular words used to refer to the characters given considerations of topicality (who is the “central character” in the unfolding na