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Personal pronouns are important linguistic components that have attracted considerable research interest. They relate to the speech act roles of the speaker, the addressee, and others. Numerous factors might affect the determination of the antecedent of a pronoun, which include syntactic factors such as the grammatical number and gender agreement, semantic factors such as animacy and specificity, and pragmatic factors such as discourse coherence and salience. Resolving pronouns appears to be complex and prone to ambiguity when these factors either conflict with each other or are underspecified. For instance, in the sentence “Mary told Jane that she was pregnant”, it is unclear whether “she” refers to Mary or Jane. Understanding pronoun functionality can aid in comprehending the inherent Universal Grammar that facilitates language acquisition and usage, as well as illuminate the role of syntactic constraint and other factors influencing language processing. Hence, it provides a useful example to compare different approaches that seek to understand the processing mechanisms of pronouns at various levels of analysis.
Recent trends in pronoun studies have led to a focus on several areas. One major area of investigation in pronoun studies is the role of various factors that affect pronoun processing. It is important because pronouns are frequently used in natural language and can convey different meanings depending on the context. Researchers have examined the influence of discourse and syntax on pronoun comprehension (Felser, 2019; Grüter et al., 2017; Kush & Dillon, 2021; Puebla & Felser, 2022). For instance, Kush and Dillon (2021) found that during the processing of cataphoric pronouns, native English speakers were capable of utilizing Principle B to guide their antecedent search. Some studies have examined the variability of pronoun processing across individuals, depending on factors like working memory capacity or age differences (Cunnings, 2017; Eilers et al., 2018). According to Cunnings (2017), working memory is essential for L2 learners to link anaphors to their antecedents. At the same time, a few studies have employed techniques such as EEG and ERP to study pronoun processing (Pablos et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2020). These technologies can unveil different brain responses elicited by various types of stimuli and illuminate the neural mechanisms underlying pronoun comprehension. Moreover, some recent research has contrasted the use of pronouns in different languages, such as those allow null subjects and those require overt ones. Contemori et al. (2022) investigated bilingual Spanish-English speakers, implying that bilingual individuals’ abilities to make inferences about coherence relations and probability distributions are influenced by their native and second languages. These studies demonstrated, to a certain extent, the complexity and diversity of pronoun processing.
Although much research has focused on pronoun processing, the general state of pronoun studies still remains unclear. The present study uses CiteSpace, a bibliometric analysis software, to visually explore the intellectual framework and changing research trends in pronoun studies, aiming to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the research field. Maps of co-cited documents and clusters, and co-occurring keywords were generated from articles obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection using CiteSpace, to reveal the most influential articles, intellectual base, and research topics in pronoun studies and examine their intellectual links. The primary objective of this study is to contribute to the scholarly discourse in the field of pronoun studies by providing critical insights into its intricate nature, analyzing and offering a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge, and suggesting directions for future research.