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The semantic or thematic role bias has often been linked to the accessibility of a referent (Stevenson, Crawley and Kleinman 1994, McDonald and MacWhinney 1995, Arnold 1998, 2001, Kehler 2002, Kehler et al. 2008). Stevenson et al. (1994) ran several written story completion studies and showed that referents bearing certain thematic roles are more likely to be mentioned in the subsequent discourse and to show higher rates of pronominalization than referents realized in other semantic roles. For example, in a sentence describing a transitive event, in which the thematic roles Source and Goal are realized, discourse participants often chose pronouns to pick up the Goal referent (given syntactically controlled constructions). In Stevenson et al.’s study (1994), participants were given story fragment passages like in (15a) and (15b) and were asked to add a continuation sentence to the initial story. Note that the second sentence of each test item ended in an ambiguous pronoun prompt, which could refer back to both female referents introduced in the first sentence.

The experimental findings reported in Stevenson et al.s’ study showed that the stories were continued with the pronoun she referring to Sarah rather than to Rebecca in (15a), as Sarah was not only the subject referent, but was also realized as the Goal referent. In a sentence describing a transitive event in which the semantic roles are reversed, such that the Source corresponds to the subject position and the Goal to the object position, as illustrated in (15b), the participants in Stevenson et al.’s (1994) experiment did not show a pronoun assignment preference towards one of the two referents. In other words, half of the participants resolved the pronoun in the second sentence to the Source=subject referent and the other half of the participants resolved it to the Goal=object referent. Stevenson et al. interpreted these results by assuming the existence of two preferences or biases being at work in contexts like in (15), namely a subject bias and a semantic or thematic role bias. While the two preferences overlap in the Goal=subject condition in (15a), resulting in more pronoun interpretations towards the referent realized in this way, the two preferences compete in the Goal=object condition in (15b). As a result, an otherwise low in prominence object referent becomes more prone to be subsequently pronominalized. An important observation pertains to the fact that two preferences compete in determining the likelihood of subsequent pronominalization.