New paper in "Linguistics" about the surprisal of personal pronouns in seventeen languages

On May, 15 2026 a new paper from Annemarie Verkerk and Luigi Talamo appeared in "Linguistics": 
"They saw it, onu, 它, coming: an information-theoretic study of cross-linguistic variation in personal pronouns". 

This paper is a SFB 1102 collaboration with  Julius Steuer , now at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, where the surprisal of personal pronouns (Engl: she, you, they, ...; Germ: sie, wir, du, ...) was assessed in seventeen languages from around the world. The authors find that pronoun frequency and position in the sentence are near-universal predictors of surprisal, while all other aspects (number, gender, ...) are very different across languages. 

This paper is dedicated to Elke Teich on her 60th birthday.  The full paper is available here.