State-of-the-art Chinese zero pronoun resolution systems are supervised, thus relying on training data containing manually resolved zero pronouns. To eliminate the reliance on annotated data, we present a generative model for unsupervised Chinese zero pronoun resolution. At the core of our model is a novel hypothesis: a probabilistic pronoun resolver trained on overt pronouns in an unsupervised...

The ultimate aim of the following pages is to explore the hypothesis that sentences containing a pronoun be analyzed as involving a topic pronoun doubling relation in a way that closely parallels the one overtly realized in Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Hanging Topic (HT) structures in Italian/Romance. In a nutshell: when a pronoun is present in the clause, a silent doubled non-overt topic...

the main goal of this research is to study, through the minimalist program, the mechanism of checking phi(φ)-features (person & number) and nominative case in persian sentences. different syntactic structures are examined in this paper. it is shown that verb raising is overt in persian and that the uninterpretable φ-features of the finite tense head are valued & checked by the interpretable φ-f...

The meaning of ‘we’ is usually seen as ‘I þ others’. Russian, along with many other languages, has a construction that allows an overt specification of ‘others’, the so-called Plural Pronoun Construction (PPC), which involves a plural pronoun and a comitative phrase. The syntactic behavior of this comitative phrase differs from that of other withphrases such as VP-adjuncts, NP-adjuncts, and com...

Anaphoric relations between pronouns and their antecedents are subject to a number of different linguistic constraints, which exclude the possibility of coreference in specific syntactic or discourse contexts. Constraints on anaphora may, in principle, impact online sentence processing in a couple of different ways. They may act as constraints on the generation of interpretations, preventing il...

Corver & Van Koppen (2011) argue that the inflection appearing on adjectival endings in Dutch and its dialects is actually an instance of a weak indefinite pronoun resembling English one. One of the arguments in support of this idea comes from the behavior of the apparent adjectival inflection in certain NPE-cases in which there is no overt inflection on the adjective. However, if ellipsis of t...

The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical, and ...

Some accounts of English pronoun case in coordination (Emonds 1986, Sobin 1997) have argued that the observed data on the phenomenon are the result of a naturally acquired grammar in which coordinated pronouns are universally accusative (Emonds’ N[ormal] U[sage]), pitted against an explicitly learned system in which coordinated pronouns are prescribed to be nominative in syntactic environments ...