Young French children freely produce subject pronouns by the age of 2. However, by age 2 and a half they fail to interpret 3rd person pronouns in an experimental setting designed to select a referent among three participants (speaker, hearer, and other). No such problems are found with 1st and 2nd person pronouns. We formalize our analysis of these empirical results in terms of direction-sensit...

This paper presents a strategy and a computational model for solving inter-sentential anaphoric pronouns in Vietnamese paragraphs composing simple sentences. The strategy is proposed based on grammatical features of nouns and the focus phenomenon when using pronouns in Vietnamese. In this research, we consider only nouns and pronouns which are human objects in the paragraph, and each anaphoric ...

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...

To further our understanding of the nature of the form–function mapping in anaphoric paradigms, this study investigated the referential properties of strong pronouns (long pronouns) in Estonian. Cross-linguistically, 2 main accounts of the long–short distinction have been proposed: the salience account (long pronouns refer to less salient antecedents) and the contrast account (long pronouns ref...

Discourse deixis is a linguistic phenomenon in which pronouns have verbal or clausal, rather than nominal, antecedents. Studies have estimated that between 5% and 10% of pronouns in non-conversational data are discourse deictic. However, current coreference resolution systems ignore this phenomenon. This paper presents an automatic system for the detection and resolution of discourse-deictic pr...

This paper describes an algorithm to identify pleonastic pronouns using statistical techniques. The training step uses a coreference annotated corpus of English and focuses on a set of pronouns such as it. As far as we know, there is no corpus with a pleonastic annotation. The main idea of the algorithm was then to recast the definition of pleonastic pronouns as pronouns that never occur in a c...

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-dro...