There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. If John owns a donkey, he beats it). Proponents of dynamic approaches take the pronoun to be a logical variable, but they revise the semantics of quantifiers so as to allow them to bind variables that are not within their syntactic scope. Older dynamic approaches took this measure to apply solely to existential quantifiers; r...

The current study provides evidence that the absence of a syntactically expected item leads to a sustained cognitive processing demand. Event-related potentials were measured at the omission of a syntactically expected object argument in a speech sequence. English monolingual adults listened to paired sentences. The first sentence in the pair established a context. The second sentence provided ...

American Sign Language famously disambiguates pronoun antecedents with the use of space. In ASL, both referential and quantificational NPs can be signed at different locations (‘loci’) in the signing space. Pronouns can later retrieve these NPs by pointing at the same locus. Many analyses of ASL pronouns assume that these spatial loci are the overt realization of formal variables (Lillo-Martin ...

In recent years, pronouns have become a white-hot interface between language and social political issues. “My are he/they” signals allegiance to one side in the culture wars, as does whatever.” But there is surprisingly little philosophical work at this interface; paper aims chart main questions argue for some answers, with hope of stimulating more research.

background : pronoun error is one of the most common errors in many speech and language disorders. therefore, knowing about the development procedure of dependent possessive pronouns (as a subgroup of pronouns), leads to build an accurate profile for evaluation and treatment of many disorders. the goal of the present study was to examine the development of dependent possessive pronouns in 2.5-4...