Previous studies have suggested that ambiguous null pronouns are biased to co-refer with topical subject antecedents. In Italian, for example, Belletti, Bennati & Sorace (2007) (henceforth BB&S) suggested that null subject pronouns typically co-refer with already established topic antecedents ([topic shift]), whereas overt subject pronouns signal a change in topic ([+topic shift]). This discour...

Although sometimes considered to act only as a means of recognizing debts, acknowledgments give the opportunity for writers to display a self-conscious and reflective representation of self. Following this assumption and to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, a corpus of 80 textbook acknowledgments in the field of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics were analyzed in order to show what “se...

Anaphora resolution attempts to determine the correct antecedent of an anaphor (the term pointing back). In what follows, we propose an algorithm for the resolution of anaphoric pronouns that relies on lexical and syntactic knowledge incorporated in a modular approach based on constraints and preferences. Our objective was to find the correct antecedent to the following subject pronouns (il, il...

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children’s nonadultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition (Philip and Coopmans (1996), Sigurjónsdóttir and Coopmans (1996)). Analyzing the antisubject orientation of pronouns in adult Norwegian as an A-Chain Condition effect at Logica...

Children acquiring their native language (L1) have been reported to have greater difficulty in interpreting pronouns than reflexives. In addition, they are less accurate when pronouns refer to referential antecedents than to quantified antecedents, and when they hear full pronouns as opposed to reduced pronouns. We hypothesize that similar difficulties of interpretation will occur for (non-adva...

The scarce resources in wireless systems compounded with their highly variable and errorprone propagation characteristics stress the need for efficient resource management. Scheduling is a key tool to allocate efficiently the radio resource. While fading effects have long been combated in wireless networks, primarily devoted to voice calls, they are now seen as an opportunity to increase the ca...

Personal pronouns and demonstratives contribute differently to the encoding of information in the mental model and they serve distinct backward- and forward-looking functions. While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent discourse entity (backward-looking function) and typically mark the maintenance of the current topic, demonstrativ...

English pronouns must agree with their antecedents in number. But in some situations, pronouns violate this constraint, as in "I think I'll order a frozen margarita. I just love them." Three situations are identified in which such violations occur: (1) Plural (and technically illegal) pronouns are used to refer to frequently or multiply occurring items or events (as opposed to a unique item/eve...