BACKGROUND Agrammatic speakers have problems with grammatical encoding and decoding. However, not all syntactic processes are equally problematic: present time reference, who questions, and reflexives can be processed by narrow syntax alone and are relatively spared compared to past time reference, which questions, and personal pronouns, respectively. The latter need additional access to discou...

This study offers an innovative, sign-based analysis of English self pronouns (myself, yourself, herself, etc.). While rejecting the traditional characterization these forms as reflexive pronouns, borrows from tradition by analyzing a kind emphatic pronoun. The forms’ distribution can be explained positing that they are semantic signals deployed speakers to meet communicative goals. Speakers ch...

This paper describes the structure of the LTH coreference solver used in the closed track of the CoNLL 2012 shared task (Pradhan et al., 2012). The solver core is a mention classifier that uses Soon et al. (2001)’s algorithm and features extracted from the dependency graphs of the sentences. This system builds on Björkelund and Nugues (2011)’s solver that we extended so that it can be applied t...

Signed languages display a variety of pointing signs that serve the functions of deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, determiners, body part labels, and verb agreement. We consider criteria for determining the linguistic status of pointing signs. Among those criteria are conventionality, indexicality, phonological compositionality, being ...

Thanks to the development of the concept of metadiscourse, it is now widely acknowledged that academic/scientific writing is not only concerned with communicating purely propositional meanings: what is communicated through academic/scientific communication is seen to be intertwined with the negotiation of social and interpersonal meanings. While a large number of so called metadiscoursal resour...

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as "king" or "engineer") or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is like...

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...