Anaphoric reference to mereological entities

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a group interpretation available (i.e., mereological entity) (e.g., The engineer hooked up the engine to the boxcar …, where group = train), or not (e.g., The engineer detached the engine from the boxcar …). Results from three experiments in which participants were asked to identify referents for singular versus plural pronouns (Experiment 1), to confirm the referents of pronouns in a sentence completion task (Experiment 2), and to provide paraphrases for given texts (Experiment 3), collectively provided evidence that the creation of a group makes that entity (i) a possible referent for singular anaphoric reference and (ii) more salient than its constituents.