In this paper we document a so-far neglected case of microvariation involving resumptive pronouns in the left-dislocation construction Meranese, spoken South Tyrol, and Mòcheno, Fersina valley (Trentino). While standard German elements belong to class D-pronouns, two Tyrolean dialects considered exhibit, as pronouns, both (i) D-pronouns (ii) pronominal usages distal demonstrative formed by defi...

We examine demonstrative pronouns in a portion of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English and propose a coding scheme that classifies pronouns with nominal as well as non-nominal antecedents into direct and indirect, depending on whether their referent is the same as the referent/denotation of the antecedent. In agreement with previous studies, we find that demonstratives more often have n...

Centering Theory is applied to a narrated film retelling in Kaqchikel Mayan in order to better understand discourse constraints on the form of referring expression. It is shown that Backwards Looking Centers are very often encoded by zero pronouns, and that center Shifts more often employ full pronouns and full noun phrases than do center Continues and Retains. Preverbal pronouns and full noun ...

The research investigated how comprehenders use structural information during co-reference resolution of the pronouns her, him, and his. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing the pronoun her in object position, functioning as SPEC or NP and preceded by one of three types of NPs in subject position (e.g., ‘‘Mary/Mark/They saw her friend/yesterday. . .’’). In Experiment 2, addit...

This paper presents a new study on the distribution and identification of zero pronouns in Romanian. A Romanian corpus that includes legal, encyclopaedic, literary, and news texts has been created and manually annotated for zero pronouns. Using a morphological parser for Romanian and machine learning methods, experiments have been performed on the created corpus for the identification of verbs ...

In many cases, as exemplified by (2), third-person pronouns co-refer with the subject of the previous sentence. Arnold (1998) found that third-person subject pronouns co-referred with the pervious sentence’s subject in 64% of cases drawn from a corpus of children’s books. Numerous studies have shown that in many cases adults expect pronouns to co-refer with previous subjects, even in the absenc...

Some analogies have been observed over the years between the semantics of pronouns, tenses and moods. Thus Partee 1973 suggested that tenses have all the uses that pronouns do, and should thus receive the same abstract analysis; her argument was then extended to mood in Stone 1997. Consider for instance the deictic use of pronouns, illustrated in (1)a. Partee's and Stone's suggestion was that t...

Empirical results on the meaning of accented pronouns often conflict. This is a problem for formal semantic models. In this paper, we intend to broaden the empirical basis of two of these models. First, in a corpus study, we checked whether properties of the antecedent influence whether a pronoun is be accented. We found that pronouns with NP antecedents are more likely to be accented than thos...