This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het ‘it’-clefts with order het-copula-pronoun Dutch. We argue that complex interaction clefts between case, and word can be explained from radical featural defectivity ‘it’: ‘it’ has third person (3p) feature, but no number, strength gender features. show is different all personal pronouns major dialect gro...

We report two experiments on the referential resolution of the German subject pronoun er and the demonstrative der (‘he’). Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the effects of grammatical role, thematic role and the information status of potential referents in the antecedent clause operationalized by word-order (canonical/non-canonical), in the context of active--accusative ...

While the referent of a nonreflexive pronoun clearly depends on context, the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. The present study seeks to characterise one representation that guides pronoun resolution. Our focus is an effect known as ‘‘implicit causality’’. In causal dependant clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main cl...

The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender informati...

Background. Up to the age of 6, children have been shown to experience difficulties in the interpretation of pronouns (but not reflexives) by incorrectly allowing the pronoun to corefer with the local subject about half the time (e.g., Chien & Wexler, 1990). Explanations for this Delay of Principle B-Effect (DPBE) range from a deficiency in pragmatic skills (Thornton & Wexler, 1999) and the eff...

1. Introduction A recurring theme in theoretical discussions of language contact is the question of borrowability—specifically, whether there are any substantive constraints governing the kinds of lexicon and structure that can be borrowed. Nowadays historical linguists are less likely to propose absolute constraints than they used to be, because everyone knows at least a few examples of 'odd' ...

In this paper we discuss a computational cognitive model of children’s poor performance on pronoun interpretation (the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect, or DPBE). This cognitive model is based on a theoretical account that attributes the DPBE to children’s inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker’s perspective. The cognitive model predicts that child hearers are unable to...

A standard assumption in linguistic, psycholinguistic, and computational research on pronoun use is that production and interpretation are guided by the same set of contextual factors. Kehler et al. (2008) and Kehler & Rohde (2013) have argued instead for a Bayesian model, one in which pronoun production is insensitive to a class of semanticallyand pragmaticallydriven contextual biases that hav...