Noun-phrase anaphors and focus: the informational load hypothesis.

The interplay between semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution: Evidence from ERPs.

In this event-related brain potential (ERP) study, we examined how semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution interact during discourse comprehension. We used a full factorial design that crossed referential ambiguity with semantic incoherence. Ambiguous anaphors elicited a sustained negative shift (Nref effect), and incoherent anaphors elicited an N400 effect. Simulta...

Antecedent typicality effects in the processing of noun phrase anaphors

Investigating Embedded Question Reuse in Question Answering

The investigation presented in this paper is a novel method in question answering (QA) that enables a QA system to gain performance through reuse of information in the answer to one question to answer another related question. Our analysis shows that a pair of question in a general open domain QA can have embedding relation through their mentions of noun phrase expressions. We present methods f...

Do Heavy-NP Shift Phenomenon and Constituent Ordering in English Cause Sentence Processing Difficulty for EFL Learners?

Heavy-NP shift occurs when speakers prefer placing lengthy or “heavy” noun phrase direct objects in the clause-final position within a sentence rather than in the post-verbal position. Two experiments were conducted in this study, and their results suggested that having a long noun phrase affected the ordering of constituents (the noun phrase and prepositional phrase) by advanced Iranian EFL le...

Metonymy as a Syntactic Strategy in Assigning Informational Prominence within the Noun Phrase

This paper shows how the syntactic strategies in assigning informational prominence in clause structures can be exploited in phrases. The thematic approach to phrases will shed clear light on the marked word order of elements in noun phrase (NP) and on how this allows increasing the degree of prominence of a component in NP. This is a general claim about different thematic strategies in NP whic...