none 10.1075/slcs.240.19hai John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 194566503 9101345 1421186 202605110819000000 10.1075 2026-05-11T06:21:28Z 2026-05-08T05:25:42Z 0 0165-7763 10.1075/slcs https://benjamins.com/ catalog/slcs Sonja Riesberg LaCiTO – CNRS https://ror.org/025esck76 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0252-0910 Uta Reinöhl University of Freiburg https://ror.org/0245cg223 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2829-682X Birgit Hellwig University of Cologne https://ror.org/00rcxh774 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4696-0827 From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations The documentarist turn, i.e., the growing impact of documentary concepts and practices within general linguistics, has increased awareness of the empirical foundations of our discipline, accompanied by an appreciation of the value of observable linguistic behaviour. Today, there exist well-annotated, audiovisual data collections for many—if still far from enough—endangered or un(der)described languages across the world, each striving to present a “lasting, multipurpose record of a language” (Himmelmann 2006). Documentary data is increasingly supporting theory-building on a larger scale, which is where the present volume steps in: What does the shift towards more diverse, ecologically valid data types mean for synchronic and diachronic linguistic analyses and typological generalizations? This question is addressed by this volume’s far-ranging contributions on academic and societal affordances (Part I), interrelations between corpus design and avenues of research (Part II), as well as synchronic (Part III) and diachronic (Part IV) research questions. 240 5 7 2026 5 7 2026 9789027234001 9789027243881 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/slcs.240 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027243881 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/slcs.240/html https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027243881.pdf Geoffrey Haig University of Bamberg https://ror.org/01c1w6d29 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5410-3692 Stefan Schnell University of Zurich https://ror.org/02crff812 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2036-2263 Abstract Since Givón (1983) and Ariel (1990) , a large body of research continues to assume that zero anaphors reflect a higher degree of accessibility than overt pronominal forms. However, when the features of animacy or person are taken as its metric, existing case studies do not consistently confirm a correlation between high accessibility and zero form, and some report the opposite tendency. In this chapter we bring a broader cross-linguistic perspective to the question, leveraging data from a multilingual richly annotated spoken language corpus covering 16 typologically diverse languages. We identify a surprisingly robust trend in support of a reversal of expected accessibility-accounts: Overall, it is non-human referents rather than human, and third person rather than first and second person, which favour zero expression. Our findings provide cross-linguistic support for the constraint ‘avoid non-human pronouns’, found by Genetti and Crain (2003) for Nepali, and a tendency to overtly realise speech-act participants as pronouns. Furthermore, we identify a significant effect of syntactic role, such that these regularities are more clearly evident for direct objects than for transitive subjects. We explore possible explanations for these results, noting similarities between our findings and well-documented patterns of differential indexing, informativity and surprisal ( Haspelmath 2021 ). More generally, these findings call for a re-assessment of the view that a single principle such as accessibility can account for referential choice among all form types. For the choice between reduced forms (pronouns and zero), distinct principles may be operative. 5 7 2026 5 7 2026 488 517 10.1075/slcs.240.19hai https://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.240.19hai https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/slcs.240.19hai/html 10.1023/A:1024109008573 10.1017/S0022226700011567 10.4324/9781315857473 Usage-based Models of Language Ariel 197 2000 The Development of Person Agreement Markers: From Pronouns to Higher Accessibility Markers Reference Form and Discourse Patterns Arnold 1998 10.1075/sidag.14.11arn 10.1080/01690960801920099 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00193.x 10.1353/lan.2000.0045 10.48564/unibafd-6nwae-ayk30 10.4324/9781315857343 The Social Cognition Parallax Corpus (SCOPIC) Barth 2017 10.48564/unibafd-6nwae-ayk30 10.1353/lan.2003.0205 10.1515/9783110331127.15 10.1515/psicl-2014-0009 10.1515/lingvan-2014-1014 10.21248/zaspil.48.2007.356 10.48564/unibafd-6nwae-ayk30 10.1515/opli-2020-0042 Lingua Vogels 145 104 2014 10.1016/j.lingua.2014.03.007 Choosing Referring Expressions in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: Effects of Animacy 10.48564/unibafd-6nwae-ayk30 Subject and Topic Chafe 27 1976 Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Point of View The Pear Stories. 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Use Less Informative Expressions for More Predictable Meanings 10.1515/ling-2019-0011 10.48564/unibafd-6nwae-ayk30 10.48564/unibafd-6nwae-ayk30 10.48564/unibafd-6nwae-ayk30 10.1075/sl.21072.vol 10.1016/j.pragma.2019.07.025 10.1017/S1360674316000216 10.2307/317734