Abstract This paper presents and discusses the instances of synchronic variation attested in personal pronoun paradigm modern Sri Lanka Portuguese, an endangered Portuguese-based creole spoken by relatively small communities scattered across Eastern Northern Lanka. Although Portuguese has a long history documentation dating from, at least, beginning 19th century, only few studies have explicitl...

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' ...

Previous research on pronoun resolution in German revealed that personal pronouns in German tend to refer to the subject or topic antecedents, however, these results are based on studies involving subject personal pronouns. We report a visual world eye-tracking study that investigated the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on the online comprehension of pronouns in German...

The present study examined the electrophysiological correlates of the psychological processing of possessive pronouns such as "wo de" (Chinese for "my"/"mine") and "ta de" (Chinese for "his") using a three-stimulus oddball paradigm. Sixteen participants were visually presented the stimuli (possessive pronouns, small circle and big circle). The results showed that, relative to non-self-relevant ...

In this paper we examine the influence of dimensionality on natural language route directions in dialogue. Specifically, we show that giving route instructions in a quasi-3d environment leads to experiential descriptive accounts, as manifested by a higher proportion of location descriptions, lack of chunking, use of 1st person singular personal pronouns, and more frequent use of temporal and sp...

We report the first study on pronoun use by an under-studied research population, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to American Sign Language from birth by their deaf parents. Personal pronouns cause difficulties for hearing children with ASD, who sometimes reverse or avoid them. Unlike speech pronouns, sign pronouns are indexical points to self and other. Despite this transp...

Recent research suggests that pronoun interpretation is guided by the semantic coherence relations between clauses. However, it is not yet wellunderstood whether coherence effects extend to other anaphoric expressions beyond pronouns. We report an experiment on German, a language in which human antecedents can be referred to both with personal and demonstrative pronouns. How do anaphoric demons...