Abstract The Old Chinese function word 焉 yān is frequently interpreted as a fusion of [ 於 (‘at/on/in’) + 此 (near demonstrative pronoun)] in terms its meaning. Ever since Kennedy ( 1940a , b ; 1953 ) argued that *an (third-person pronoun)], it has been controversial to exactly which third-person pronoun/demonstrative pronoun corresponds Chinese. There no appropriate for this reconstruction. This...

Cataphoric dependencies where a pronoun precedes its antecedent appear to call on different mechanisms in language comprehension from forward dependencies where the antecedent precedes the pronoun. Previous research has shown that the resolution of cataphoric dependencies involves predictive processes such as the active search mechanism, which hypothesizes the automatic search for an antecedent...

This essay outlines the problems associated with the history and current absence of a genderneutral third-person singular personal pronoun in the English language. The combination of the social and grammatical consequences of this language gap results in pronoun choices that are either politically incorrect or verbose. Experts’ attempts to fill this language gap have failed to take root on any ...

in the classification of morpho-phonological processes of different languages proposed by jensen (1990), the least frequent process is perhaps the one related to morph-movement due to morpho-phonological reasons, which leads to changes in the canonical order of morphs in the word form. this article aimed to introduce a case of this rare process in kalhori kurdish. this process takes place in th...

Interpretation of a pronoun in one clause can be systematically affected by the verb in the previous clause. Compare Archibald angered Bartholomew because he… (he=Archibald) with Archibald criticized Bartholomew because he… (he=Bartholomew). While it is clear that meaning plays a critical role, it is unclear whether that meaning is directly encoded in the verb or, alternatively, inferred from w...

Interpretation of a pronoun is driven by properties of syntactic distribution. Consequently, acquiring the meaning and the distribution are intertwined. In order to learn that a pronoun is reflexive, learners need to know which entity the pronoun refers to in a sentence, but in order to infer its referent they need to know that the pronoun is reflexive. This study examines whether discourse inf...

We present two magnitude estimation experiments on the role of resumptive pronouns in subject extraction in English and German. In the theoretical literature, resumptives have been claimed to remedy effects of island violations, but our results show that this is not the case. Furthermore, our data also confirm the existence of a that-trace effect for both languages, contrary to theoretical clai...

Two self-paced reading-time experiments are reported that examine the time course of pronoun interpretation processes based on local discourse structure and on world knowledge. The characterization of local discourse structure is based on recent work on centering, which provides a specific formulation of how the ways in which sentences make reference to common entities determines the coherence ...

In Koornneef and Van Berkum's (2006) eye-tracking study of implicit causality (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977), midsentence delays were observed in the processing of sentences such as "David blamed Linda because she((bias-congruent))/he((bias-incongruent)) . . . " when the pronoun following because was incongruent with the bias of the implicit-causality verb. The authors suggested tha...

Syntactic knowledge is important for pronoun resolution. Traditionally, the syntactic information for pronoun resolution is represented in terms of features that have to be selected and defined heuristically. In the paper, we propose a kernel-based method that can automatically mine the syntactic information from the parse trees for pronoun resolution. Specifically, we utilize the parse trees d...