Default case appears when a DP cannot get case through normal syntactic mechanisms (Schütze 2001). In an OT system, default case is best analyzed as an example of emergence of the unmarked. When case cannot be assigned, the least marked case is used. A constraint system is developed that includes markedness constraints for assigning structural case and faithfulness constraints for assigning non...

Several typological gaps have attracted a lot of interest in the linguistic literature recently. These concern the Person Case Constraint and the absence of ABA patterns in adjectival gradation, pronoun suppletion, case syncretism, and singular noun allomorphy, among others. This paper is the first to provide a unified explanation of all these phenomena, and it does so via weakly non-inverting ...

This study addresses pronominal anaphora resolution, including zero pronouns, in Chinese. A syntactic, rule-based pronoun resolution algorithm, the “Hobbs algorithm” was run on “gold standard” hand parses from the Penn Chinese Treebank. While first proposed for English, the algorithm counts for its success on two characteristics that Chinese and English have in common. Both languages are SVO, a...

Psychological investigations of pronoun resolution have implicitly assumed that the processes involved automatically provide a unique referent for every pronoun. We challenge this assumption and propose a new framework for studying pronoun resolution. Drawing on advances in discourse representation and global memory modeling, this framework suggests that automatic processes may not always ident...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how the semantics of third-person pronouns can vary across languages. I investigate third-person non-demonstrative pronouns in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish), including null pro and its overt animate plural counterpart wit. I provide evidence for a striking cross-linguistic difference between the St’át’imcets pronouns and English ones: third-pers...

Anaphora resolution is one of the most important research topics in Natural Language Processing. In English, overt pronouns such as she and definite noun phrases such as the company are anaphors that refer to preceding entities (antecedents). In Japanese, anaphors are often omitted, and these omissions are called zero pronouns. There are two major approaches to zero pronoun resolution: the heur...

This paper used self-paced reading to test processing preferences in pronoun interpretation in English two clause sentences. The results demonstrate that people’s preferences can be reversed by changing the coherence relation between the clauses. The results are not compatible with the existence of a single all-purpose strategy in pronoun resolution. Rather, the results support Kehler’s (2002) ...

This paper provides evidence for an analysis of subject inversion in whquestions in Spanish and demonstrates that techniques of experimental syntax play an important role in developing such analyses. The techniques used show that there is gradience in judgments of wh-questions depending on the nature of the filler and of the intervening subject. The facts fall out from the interplay of straight...

This article reports the results of an experiment on production of his/her in English as a second language (L2) by proficient native speakers of Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. In Dutch and English, 3rd person singular possessive pronouns agree in gender with their antecedents, in Italian and Spanish possessives in general agree with the noun they accompany (possessum). However, while in Italian t...

In order to identify the basic properties of PoRs and the theoretical questions that follow, consider the German active-passive pair in (3a, b) involving the reflexive use of the verb ‘waschen’ (to wash). As in ordinary passives, the lexical verb in (3b) appears as passive participle and the passive auxiliary werden (to become) is used. The external argument disappears (but it can reappear in a...