Is anaphora-resolution really always as simple as attaching to the most recent person, in Finnish?
I'd bet it's not always that simple, in any spoken language.
I'd bet it's not always that simple, in any spoken language.
I took a look at a few of the top articles on Helsinki times right now (yes, those don't represent the spoken language very well, but I doubt it matters for this purpose) and some of their top comments. In the articles themselves almost every instance of "hän" (=he/she) referred to someone who had been described or named in the previous sentence. Only in one occasion the person was named in the previous paragraph (there were no other people named in between). In the comments there were some cases with no name/description, but they were commenting on a story about a person (unabomber in this case), so there was no ambiguity there.