Since the introduction of the X-bar principles it is commonly assumed that prepositions are heads of PPs, in the same way as nouns and pronouns are heads of NPs. However, while this is well motivated for a large majority of the pronouns and the prepositions in many languages, there are also exceptions. More specifically, Van Eynde (1999) argues that the reduced or minor pronouns of Dutch—as opp...

Three approaches to the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) are identified, the Critical approach, the Pragmatic approach, and the Critical Pragmatic approach. Critical EAP is appealing pedagogically because of its restive questioning of discourse norms, although it can seem reactionary at times. By focusing on the acquisition of the same dominant norms, Pragmatic EAP has a clear go...

Behavioral studies investigating the influence of the relative word frequency of antecedent nouns on the processing of anaphoric pronouns have yielded contradictory results. While some researchers found no effect of an antecedent's frequency of occurrence on coreference resolution [J. Simner, R. Smyth, Phonological activation in anaphoric lexical access (ALA), Brain Lang. 68 (1999) 40-45], othe...

This paper revisits the relationship between the form of referring expressions and the assumed salience of their referents. Previous work suggests that pronouns must refer to highly salient discourse entities, while descriptive noun phrases should be used to refer to less salient items. Our claim is that the referring expression itself is only part of this relationship, since it is not the only...