Children acquiring their native language (L1) have been reported to have greater difficulty in interpreting pronouns than reflexives. In addition, they are less accurate when pronouns refer to referential antecedents than to quantified antecedents, and when they hear full pronouns as opposed to reduced pronouns. We hypothesize that similar difficulties of interpretation will occur for (non-adva...

Personal pronouns and demonstratives contribute differently to the encoding of information in the mental model and they serve distinct backward- and forward-looking functions. While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent discourse entity (backward-looking function) and typically mark the maintenance of the current topic, demonstrativ...

English pronouns must agree with their antecedents in number. But in some situations, pronouns violate this constraint, as in "I think I'll order a frozen margarita. I just love them." Three situations are identified in which such violations occur: (1) Plural (and technically illegal) pronouns are used to refer to frequently or multiply occurring items or events (as opposed to a unique item/eve...

This paper proposes a method to extract rules for anaphora resolution of Japanese zero pronouns from aligned sentence pairs. The method focuses on the characteristics of Japanese and English in which both the language families and the distribution of zero pronouns are very different. In this method, zero pronouns in the Japanese sentence and the English translation equivalents of their antecede...

The present paper discusses two interesting phenomena concerning phifeatures on plural pronouns: (i) plural pronouns that denote atomic individuals (‘dependent plural pronouns’), and (ii) plural pronouns with more than one binder (‘partial binding’). A novel account of these two phenomena is proposed, according towhich all occurrences of phi-features are both semantically and morphologically re...

This paper presents a new study on the distribution, identification, and resolution of zero pronouns in Romanian. A Romanian corpus, including legal, encyclopaedic, literary, and news texts has been created and manually annotated for zero pronouns. Using a morphological parser for Romanian and machine learning methods, experiments were performed on the created corpus for the identification and ...

Certain properties of indefinite pronouns have received considerable attention in the literature. For instance, negative polarity indefinites such as English any constitute the focus of the bulk of the literature on negative polarity items, the fact notwithstanding that Klima in his seminal 1964 paper did not fail to show that members of other syntactic and semantic categories may be restricted...

The term anaphora describes backward reference to items previously occurring in a text (see e.g., Mitkov, 2002). The pointing back item is called an anaphor and the item to which it refers is called its antecedent. The identification of an anaphor’s antecedent is termed anaphora resolution and is considered one of the most difficult tasks in natural language processing (NLP) since it relies on ...